SUNDAY, OCT 25, 2020: NOTE TO FILE
Endgame 2184
The sustainable empire outcome
'For the first time in history a conviction has developed among those who can actually think more than a decade ahead that we are playing a global endgame. Humanity's grasp on the planet is not strong. It is growing weaker. Our population is too large....' — Edward O. Wilson, Half Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life 2016
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: GEORGE ORWELL, FROM THE WIRES, OUTCOMES
Abstract: A possible endgame: Three sovereign states (Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia) contend for global dominance such that if one begins to become dominate, the other two form an alliance to diminish their enemy's gains in the Disputed Areas (the North Polar Front and Equatorial Front of North-central Africa, the Middle East, Southern India, and Southeast Asia). This potential outcome did not happen in the twentieth century, because things fall apart, and for the old world order did, but in just two hundred years, Orwell's vision was realized. This vision was occasioned by an image of inequality.
Coos Bay (A-P) — With the collapse of the global political economy in the 21st century, the game starts with six billion adult players contending for control of their local area (its people and resources) to see who dominates. First, a quarter billion bands of 20 to 50 contenders self-organize to compete to form tribal-sized groups of 150-400. As this exceeds Dunbar's number (dyad number >11K), hierarchies of command and control systems form to create complex societies dominated by the winners, typically a warlord alpha-male type. Early empire building begins.
The 24 million winners (there are now 24 million tribal-sized groups) then contend to see who dominates their local region to form chiefdom-sized complex societies (leaders may or may not be elected) of 400 to 40,000 people which requires multiple rounds (4-5 rounds) of contested game play to consolidate multiple kinship groups (and eliminate others) living in multiple permanent agricultural settlements. Natural boundaries formed by ridges and water mean the chiefdom-sized areas tend to occupy watershed areas of potentially manageable complex society size. The ongoing scarcity induced conflict results in the formation of 25 thousand chiefdom level complex societies worldwide by 2100 CE.
Watershed Management Units (WMUs) self-organize, some as principalities and city-states, others as democracies. Some have more environmental resources (e.g. agricultural land) and human resources (e.g. wage-slaves) than others to support a larger population. As their expansion pushes biophysical limits they expand by right of conquest, the pre-mid-20th century norm, to become state level complex societies with populations of 50 thousand and up. Several state level complex societies compete to see who comes to control the local ecoregion. The horizon in all directions is viewed as an illimitable plane for the taking. Empires grow.
At some point (as larger groups prevail even as populations plummet) about 25 hundred contending empire builders continue to play the game. Thanks to ecological awareness developed among environmentalists in the twentieth century, the winners who form ever larger complex societies come to rule all bioregions of the planet.
Consolidation of power is rapid and by 2125 CE there are 250 nation-state level complex societies that continue to contend until 30 remain. Each seeks to dominate so as to create the ecological civilization and green economy all right thinking humans long for.
Seven Ecolates and 30 Sublates
Within each of the thirty sublates that have formed, the armies of each contend to determine who rules their ecolate. The six populated ecolates contend until 2184 when only three contenders remain. Each requires an enemy to keep the socio-political-ecomonic dynamic that empire-building selects for keeping on. If there were only two remaining powers, one would, if only by chance, become slightly favored, would weaken their rival and become stronger until victory was absolute.
There would then be no enemy or identity politics as basis for super-tribal identity and the one final global complex society would collapse as the one in the 21st century had. There could be no war other than civil war to dissipate resources and populations to keep society on a war footing. The unneeded or dysfunctional individuals who failed to serve their empire could not be sent to the front, but they could protest/fight on the streets. The global complex society would go into overshoot and fail. GAME OVER. The remnant population, all adult players, would restart to repeat the pattern until, after some centuries or millennia pass, they couldn't.
To avoid the GAME OVER endgame, a tripartite system of global governance would allow for the sustainable development of three dissipative structures. They would need Disputed Areas to focus the conflict needed to keep citizens focused on the obvious need to conquer (rather than be conquered by their mortal enemies). Each sovereign power would have a sink for surplus population, resources, and dysfunctional behaviors needed to keep their economy 'growing' or producing to replace losses. Each could then work and strive to dominate the world, but only if the three leaders had learned that if one won, then all would fail. The Great Leaders would have to understand that the two weaker powers had to form an alliance to survive, so the game could persist, and often form an alliance with their former 'age-old' enemy while celebrating their former enemy as their 'glorious ally' until they are not. This pattern, once established, would select for its continuance.
Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia, and needed Disputed Areas to allow for sustainable war.
So how can future leaders be educated? Monopoly is not a sustainable game, so a new board game will be invented called Empire, and all children, among whom would be all future leaders, will have to play it (will feel compelled to if told that everyone was playing it). It will basically be the same as the board game of Monopoly where one player wins all followed by GAME OVER for all. 
But the 3-person board game of Empire involves multiple tournaments of games. The winners of the first round play each other in a second round and so on. Imagine six billion would-be leaders divide into groups of three to play two billion games of Empire. The next day two billion winners do the same. In less than twenty rounds there would be three remaining champions to play Global Empire.
The final three-way endgame, however, selects for a different outcome from all prior ones by following different rules of the game so a never ending game of Global Empire, unlike all prior ones, can then be played. The three players agree that the two weaker players at any given time must form an alliance that prevents whoever happens to be the stronger sovereign power from winning. The three victors will play on and on, and be celebrated and given all they could want, so they will want to keep the game going.
They would be admired by the teaming millions. They shall, however, pass away one by one, but their replacements will be duly elected (or another Tournament of Empire could select replacements) . The world would at last be made safe for democracy, all three of them. As in prior empires, it really wouldn't matter who the Tri-presidents, the heads of state, are. They, like everyone else, serve the system or are selected out of it.
Or, after the fall, WMUs form but a majority of them, thanks to the teachings of systems ecologists and human ecologists (and Orwell), foresee the outcome of empire building and so have no choice but to submit to limits (i.e. to understand the growth dynamic is to be delivered from it). Deliverance is as imposed by mutual coercion mutually agreed to, as formulated by a global government, a naturocracy that obediently, choicelessly follows natural laws as Nature whispers them. Call it the United Federation of Watersheds (or not).
Humanity can only win the game of Empire by not playing it. The only way to win at Russian roulette if played more than a few times is to not play the game. There may be short-term payoffs with victories, but the game is not sustainable, i.e. it selects for its own failure, even with the one tripartite solution that results in 'a boot stomping in the human face forever'. But maybe eventually, with more and better technology, we could become Borg and stomp in the face of all beings in the universe, forever! As a complex society, you can't keep on doubling more than a few tens of times before GAME OVER. To understand this dynamic is to be delivered from it because you have no choice.
The tripartite global empire would be sustainable. It would be an adaptive, dissipative structure like a benign tumor on the planet. But would it be evolvable? Hurricanes just keep on coming, but those viewed by dinosaurs of the Jurassic probably looked like those of today look to birds. They are vast, impressively dissipative structures, but they do not evolve. They adapt, but they do not live as they cannot evolve. Complex society may come to persist as a benign tumor, but if humans are to evolve, it may take a different solution. A better ecological civilization by design may be needed.
3/3/2022 SUBNOTE TO FILE:
So the sustainable (tripartite) empire option will not be our future. The number of possible futures declines over time, so those for 2100 will decline to zero by Jan. 1, 2101. That Russia will not align with Europe, or vice versa, to become Eurasia, (to contend perhaps sustainably with Eastasia and Oceania) is now evident. Russia, to become great again, must leave the West and its economic hegemony. Too little was being paid for Soviet Union exports of fossil fuels in the 1980s to support the ruling elites who could not demand higher prices as they had failed to bury the West.
The same is now a threat to Putin's and fellow keptocrat's continence as they cannot demand higher prices without creating a new world order, so as per long-term planning, they are prepared for Western sanctions and other reactivity. The West's mania for punishing Putin will end Russian exports of gas and coal to a Europe that is now dependent on them. Russia will join India and China to form a bipartite global economy, one empowered by East Eurasian energy resources and exports to continue development and progress for all (increasing the number of Russian billionaires).
Together they will bury the West, leading to economic collapse first in the West (starting in Europe having a low resources/population ratio), likely involving a nuclear war as that will be the last source of awesome power in the West. The East will have foreseen as much and plan to prevail, perhaps with a pre-emptive EMP strike. The East will inherit the rubble, for a time.
The final collapse of modern techno-industrial society, after such resources in the West as remain are expropriated to allow for continued prosperity in the East (imports of Soylent Green will increase), will be in the Sino region (Russia, India, and Southeast Asia having collapsed) that will transition to regional conflicts as will have already occurred everywhere else. Those who inherit the regional rubble on down to village rubble will then pass away.
The downslope may last 8-12 generations and all may be so dysfunctional in the end that no one rebuilds because they can't. I don't claim that such will happen, only that collapse to self-extinction could happen and is likely enough, per past lives of humans (e.g. Göbekli Tepe, Çatalhöyük, Nebelivka, Malta, Flinders Island, Liangzhu culture, Akkadian Empire, Bactria–Margiana, Norte Chico civilization, Indus Valley Civilization, Erlitou culture, Minoan civilization, Sea Peoples, Hittite Empire, Neo-Assyrian Empire, Chavín culture, Olmec, Paracas culture, Han Dynasty of China, Lima culture, Nazca culture, Moche, Izapa, Maya civilization, Zapotec civilization, Quimbaya, Tang Dynasty of China, Tiwanaku, Wari, Pueblo at Chaco Canyon, Pueblo at Mesa Verde, Cahokia, Great Zimbabwe, Angkor civilization of the Khmer Empire, Norse colony on Greenland, Original Polynesian civilization on Pitcairn Island and Henderson Island, Pre-Columbian complex societies in Amazonia, Hohokam, Rapa Nui, Malden Island, Munhumutapa Empire), to be of concern.
