What was the big lesson of the COVID pandemic? Poor countries shouldn't bother with lockdowns. Rich countries are welcome to do stupid shit of any sort. The thing makes no fucking difference. The plain fact is- Death is part of Life. For Life to flourish, Death must flourish. Deal with it.
Jonathan S Blake & Nils Gilman, of the Berggruen Institute for Talking Bollocks, ask in Aeon magazine which political system is 'fit for governing the planet'? Consider the problem of global epidemics. How should they be tackled? One thing we can all agree on is that the WHO must play no role. It is utterly shit. Consider the Pandemic agreement they have been working on since 2021. Under the leadership of a pharmacist by the name of Precious Matsoso, of South Africa, it started off by demanding the Sun and the Moon and ended up achieving nothing at all. The Chinese were cool with this. They had ignored the 1969 treaty when it really counted. It suited them to turn the WHO and the Pandemic treaty into a fight between rich White peeps and South African Blecks who had suffered under Apartheid.
Blake & Gilman won't admit this. Yet, they write-
The major sticking points appear in Article 12 of the draft treaty, ‘Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing System’. Under this arrangement, countries would be required to rapidly share information about emerging pathogens, including samples and genetic sequences.
What's wrong with that? The big problem is that the International Health Regulation agreement of 1969 was largely ignored or was wholly ineffective during the Pandemic. That's the problem the WHO could not tackle. Instead it sucked up to the Chinese.
But the Global South justifiably fears that their costly efforts at monitoring and information-sharing
for which they will get financial help. Otherwise they won't do it.
will be used to create tests, vaccines and therapeutics that get hoarded by the Global North.
Which may be able to figure out a cure. But the Global South has too many people and doesn't care about lots of them dying. On the other hand, their leaders do want to be bribed.
Negotiators from lower-income countries insist that the treaty includes guarantees for equitable access to any pharmaceutical developments, something that wealthier countries are hesitant to accept.
We also want equitable access to your teenaged daughters.
‘We don’t want to see Western countries coming to collect pathogens, going with pathogens, making medicines, making vaccines, without sending back to us these benefits,’ Jean Kaseya, the director-general of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The New York Times.
How will you stop this? You can always hire some locals very cheaply to collect the samples. Disintermediate trained people with high tax-free salaries.
Beyond political disputes over finance mechanisms, the equitable distribution of vaccines and treatments, and intellectual property rights, the reason for the failure to reach a global pandemic agreement boils down to the core conceptual feature of the contemporary international system: state sovereignty.
Why are the Ukrainians asserting state sovereignty? Ought they not to give access to their teenage daughters to all and sundry? As for 'intellectual property'- firstly, property is theft. Secondly, 'intellectuals' know stuff. Knowledge is very bad because it was invented by Whitey so as to make us darkies look stooopid.
The question we must address is how we can dismantle state sovereignty. A good start would be to introduce slavery and break up families and ship people off to distant lands in company with others of different races and religions and languages. That way, nobody would have any property or attachment to land or family. Thus there would be no States and no free people. World Government will be achievable.
Though the draft treaty is adamant in its respect for national sovereignty – it both reaffirms ‘the principle of the sovereignty of States in addressing public health matters’
Which is crazy! How come foreigners can't insist that our government chop off all our hands so as to eliminate the risk of masturbation which, studies have shown, can cause me to get sacked?
and recognises ‘the sovereign right of States over their biological resources’ – nation-states have baulked at granting new authority to the WHO.
Because it is shit.
Republicans in the United States Senate have demanded that the US President Joe Biden’s administration oppose the pandemic treaty, claiming it would ‘constitute intolerable infringements upon US sovereignty’.
Whereas, the truth is, the treaty is useless.
The United Kingdom government, likewise, has said it will support the treaty only if it ‘respects national sovereignty’.
Because saying 'Darkies should fuck the fuck off' isn't politically correct.
In politics, there is no ‘world’; only states.
No. There is a world large portions of which are constituted into sovereign states.
For pathogens, there are no ‘states’; there is only the world
No. Pathogens can be kept out of any portion of the world which kills on sight any potential carriers of that pathogen who may seek to enter a specific sovereign territory.
These concerns about sovereignty get to the molten core of the problem with this pandemic treaty, or really any pandemic treaty – indeed the entire multilateral system.
The core is that everybody isn't exactly the same. The solution is to chop of everybody's limbs and heads till they are equally dead.
The WHO, like every other arm of the United Nations, isn’t accountable to the world or even to world health but to the nation-states that are its members.
It is shit. Defund that racket! What it was proposing was that it should itself gain total power over every country's health resources. It was told to go fuck itself. Biden has a unilateral deal for 50 selected countries. Let us see if the US sticks the course on this.
As a result, things that would be good for ‘the world’ – like a global strategy to fight the next pandemic – often crash into firm convictions about the national interest as well as the hard-won, jealously guarded principle of national autonomy.
As opposed to some Chinese puppet from Ethiopia trying to make himself Dictator of the World and being told to go fuck himself.
Tedros may believe that ‘the world still needs a pandemic treaty,’ and that it’s his mission ‘to present the world with a generational pandemic agreement,’ but he will again and again face the same problem: in politics, there is no ‘world’; only states.
One state- China- propped him up. But, sooner or later, they will sour on Ethiopia.
Compounding the problem is the fact that for pathogens, there are no ‘states’; there is only the world.
For some pathogens, there are nice Chinese labs where 'gain of function' research is carried out.
This basic mismatch between the scale of the problem and the scale of possible solutions is a source of many of today’s failures of global governance.
For example, the abject failure of global governance to chop everybody's head off so as to solve the dandruff problem.
Nation-states and the global governance institutions they have formed simply aren’t fit for the task of managing things such as viruses, greenhouse gases and biodiversity, which aren’t bound by political borders, but only by the Earth system.
These two cretins live in America. They didn't notice that the US wasn't bound by shit when it invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.
As a result, the diplomats may still come to agree on a pandemic treaty – they’ve committed to keep working – but, so long as the structure of the international system continues to treat sovereignty as sacrosanct, they will never be able to effectively govern this or other planetary-scale phenomena.
Sovereignty will continue to remain sacrosanct so long as at least one person is not a slave. We must abolish freedom because these two nutters want a World Government.
In our quest for control over nature’s slings and arrows, we humans have dammed rivers
like beavers
and made war on microbes,
all animals have immune systems which do so
turbocharged grain production
humans are very evil. They eat food. Food should be banned.
and ventured into outer space.
oh!, the hubris!
We’ve domesticated animals into companions,
Some stupid billionaire domesticated these two cretins.
labour and food, and figured out how to turn the fossilised remains of ancient lifeforms into energy.
The two of you have done shit.
We’ve constructed homes and cities, razed forests and grasslands, built berms and seawalls, all to keep the elements at bay and improve our own lives. As we did all this, we took account only of human needs and desires – or rather, of some humans’ needs and desires – and ran roughshod over everything else.
Not till everybody is enslaved and has had their head chopped off in an environmentally sustainable manner will these two nutters stop writing stupid books.
What’s good for fungi, flora or fauna remains irrelevant, if not deliberately negated.
Some nice fungi could grow out of your neck if only you'd let us chop your fucking head off.
From a certain point of view – one held mainly by the wealthy and powerful – it seems as if Man has conquered Nature, or at any rate is justified in trying.
Whereas poor people would be very happy if some nice fungi started sprouting of their necks.
These pretensions of mastery have cultural as well as technological origins.
Whitey has culture. Darkies would prefer to let fungi grow out of their necks.
Culturally, we in the West, at least, have inherited a tradition of human exceptionalism rooted in the idea that human beings, uniquely, are made in God’s image and, as the Bible says, are meant to ‘have dominion … over all the earth’.
These two cunts don't know that the Bible was written in the East.
Over millennia, human civilisations have developed the tools to enact that dominion – to use nature solely as our ‘instruments’, as Aristotle put it.
In the West, Man plays the flute. In the East, nice pieces of bamboo toot his flute.
Technologies, from the control of fire to writing to the internal combustion engine to CRISPR, have given humans immense power over other species and Earth itself.
Other species should have immense power over us. Also, everybody should be buried under the Earth itself.
But too often our self-image produced by the interactions of our culture and our technologies has led to the belief that this power is unbound and that we have succeeded in taming nature.
Very true. A guy who tames a wild stallion thinks he has unbound power. That's why he tries to get the horse to sprout wings and fly through the sky.
An emerging scientific consensus, however, makes clear that not only have we not tamed nature, we can’t tame nature, for the simple reason that we are part of nature.
In which case nature can be tamed by nature.
Human beings are inextricably part of the biosphere, part of Earth.
Till we start terraforming planets or turn into beings composed of pure energy.
These insights emerge from rigorous scientific study, not mystical reflection, and reveal our place within the biogeochemical churn of this planet.
But more rigorous scientific study gives us more power over that 'churn'.
A vast and expanding infrastructure of sensors across, above and below Earth, and the networks of software and hardware that process and interpret the mountains of data the sensors produce, have demonstrated, with an accuracy and precision unmatched by previous generations, that humans are embedded in this planet’s system of systems.
Previously, humans thought they were embedded in the asteroid belt.
What this new and growing planetary sapience is revealing is systematic wreckage.
It is only revealing that to nutters and gobshites.
Scientists have determined that human actions (really, some humans’ actions) have pushed Earth past the ‘safe operating space for humanity’ for six of nine ‘planetary boundaries’, including climate change, biosphere integrity and freshwater change.
Suppose the British Empire had defeated and conquered all other countries and Empires. Then the same outcome would have obtained.
We now understand not only the damage that we are doing to planetary systems but the damage that we are doing to ourselves as elements of those systems. The Earth sustains us, not the other way around. There is no possibility of human thriving unless the ecosystems that we are part of thrive.
No. If ecosystems crash the less productive and poorer will die. So what? Death is part of Life. We sustain the earth by getting buried in it.
The realisation of our planetary condition may insult our narcissistic self-regard,
these two cretins enjoy nothing better than the smell of their own farts
but it also yields a positive possibility: that human flourishing is possible only in the context of multispecies flourishing on a habitable planet.
For which lots of people may need to die. Perhaps a genetically modified type of piranha which is able to walk on land could eat half the global population. Then some nice genetically modified triffids could eat the pirahnas before quickly bio-degrading into lesbian librarians who eat vegan pussies.
The aim of habitability is meant to diverge from the now-dominant concept of sustainability.
Both require death to flourish.
While the concept of sustainability treats nature both as distinct from humans and as existing for humans’ responsibly managed instrumental use, the concept of habitability understands humans as embedded in and reliant on the more-than-human natural world.
But neither gets that no great disaster would befall if the human population went down by half. Sadly, it isn't going to happen.
Stripped of sustainability’s anthropocentrism, habitability focuses on fostering the conditions that allow complex life in general
by writing and talking shite
– including, but not only, humans – to live well.
I suppose these guys live well enough funded by some billionaire.
This vision of multispecies flourishing is at once generous and selfish.
It is a vision which any lazy, stupid, cretin can have.
Expanding the circle of concern to include the multispecies menagerie is certainly more beneficent than current politics typically allows, but it is also absolutely about ensuring the survival of our species.
This was the foolish 'One Health Provision' the WHO wanted which was about "recognizing the interconnection between the health of people, animals and the environment, that is coherent, integrated, coordinated and collaborative among all relevant organizations, sectors and actors, as appropriate.' In other words, instead of just pharmacists, the WHO could hire guys who look after goats and pay them a nice tax free salary.
What’s bad for them is, ultimately, bad for us. These goals – thriving ecosystems in a stable biosphere supporting human lives and nonhuman life – must be our new lodestar.
So we can talk yet more stupid paranoid shit.
The central question of our time is: how can we achieve this?
By writing shitty articles for Aeon and getting a billionaire to fund us.
The term that scholars and policymakers
shit scholars, useless policymakers
initially proposed to make sense of this new knowledge is ‘global’. It is now common knowledge that Earth is experiencing global climate change, we just lived through a global pandemic, global biodiversity is at risk of its sixth mass extinction event, and this is an era of global economic, political and cultural interconnections.
Previously, people lived through two World Wars. So what?
Yet this familiar language of the global papers over an important distinction. The word globe as it’s used in discussions of globalisation, observed the historian Dipesh
Pronounced Dipshit
Chakrabarty in 2019,
Dipshit realized that nobody believed he knew anything about India. He'd better start gassing on about the globe.
‘is not the same as the word globe in the expression global warming’. The globe of globalisation is a fundamentally human concept and category: it frames Earth from a human point of view.
Everything we frame is framed from a human point of view. Dipshit, however, should be framed from the point of view of the horse's ass from which he emanated.
This globe is constructed for and by human intentions and concerns. Globalisation, the process of worldwide integration predicated on this perspective, is about the movement of people and their stuff, ideas, capital, data, and more.
Dipshit's native Bengal was integrated into a global Empire which is why it rose a little. Then India became independent and the place turned to shit.
The globe of global warming is a different object altogether.
In that case, governments need not bother with it. You can't have treaties about something which is beyond any human frame.
This concept and category – which we will now call the ‘planetary’
like Heidegger?
– frames Earth without adopting a human point of view.
These two cretins have a sub-human point of view. Still, some billionaire is funding them so they are laughing all the way to the bank.
From the planetary, as opposed to the global, perspective, what stands out is the interlinked systems of life, matter and energy.
These guys have smaller brains than gerbils. But they think their brains are as large as planets.
This concept forces us to take on objects and processes that are much vaster and much smaller than we can easily comprehend, as well as timeframes far outside lived human experience. Trying to make sense of the ‘intangible modes of being’ captured by the concept of the planetary, as the anthropologist Lisa Messeri writes in Placing Outer Space (2016), is a struggle, but we have no choice.
Yes we do. We can tell anthropologists that they have shit for brains.
The globe of global climate change – the planet – impacts humans and is impacted by humans, but it existed before our species evolved and will be here long after our extinction.
Maybe. Maybe not. But we could say this equally of the Sun or the Milky Way.
In approaching problems such as climate change as global – that is, in a fundamental way, human
Actually, James Lovelock was studying the Martian atmosphere when he came up with the Gaia hypothesis.
– we have made a categorical mistake.
No. These guys have made a stupid mistake. Scientists under stuff about cosmic rays and sun spots and the ozone layer. Nobody thinks the Earth is a sweet old lady named Gaia.
For one, it suggests the goal for our action should be sustainability – an anthropocentric, global concept – rather than habitability – a multispecies, planetary concept.
Gaia is a sweet old lady who has a Yorkshire terrier. We should help her turn Australia into a habitable kennel.
Moreover, the framing of problems as global suggests that they can be addressed with the tools we have at hand: modern political ideas and the architecture of global governance that has emerged since the Second World War.
In other words, the tools we have are the tools we have not tools which have never existed.
But planetary problems cannot. This helps to explain why decades of attempts to manage planetary problems with global institutions have failed.
Nonsense! The Montreal Protocol has reduced the size of the ozone layer. If you screen out the nutters and gobshites and Chinese agents, you can get universal ratification of anything sensible.
The failure to halt greenhouse gas emissions – the cause of planetary climate change – is a prime example. In June 1992, at the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro,
which was counter-productive. The Montreal Protocol built upon a previous agreement between 20 countries at Vienna. Keep out the ranters and nutters and progress can be made.
the representatives of 154 nation-states signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC),
If 20 had done so, something might have come of it. I suppose Bush wanted to look cool by signing it. But the US never really committed to it. Malaysia's Mahathir did a good job telling the West to go fuck itself when it tried to pretend the convention meant shit.
committing to ‘prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’. The international agreement was hailed as a landmark step in global environmental governance, but the very text of the treaty reveals the source of its own impotence. Alongside its plea for ‘the widest possible cooperation by all countries’ toward avoiding the ‘adverse effects’ of climate change, the treaty reaffirms nation-states’ ‘sovereign right to exploit their own resources’, including, of course, fossil fuel resources. ‘The principle of sovereignty of States,’ the UNFCCC declares, is the bedrock of any ‘international cooperation to address climate change.’
Why is the UNFCCC not declaring that the principle of chopping everybody's head off is the bedrock of some shite or the other?
The UNFCCC, which remains the primary global body tasked with curbing climate change, doesn’t respond to the atmosphere, nor to the planet it envelops.
Nobody can respond to things which can't talk.
Like the WHO, it responds instead, and only, to its member states.
If should be responding to black holes in the Andromeda galaxy.
The member states, meanwhile, respond to their human citizens (at least, ideally). No part of this chain of authority is concerned with the planet’s climate as a whole.
Nor to the welfare of the Galactic cluster.
In this, the UNFCCC is no different than any of the other institutions of global governance.
It is more shit than average.
The international system is built upon the foundation of the sovereign nation-state.
As opposed to the Slave Empires of Andromeda.
The UN and its many parts and agencies – from UNICEF to the Universal Postal Union – answer not to humanity nor the world, but the nations that united to join it.
Bureaucrats answer to those who pay them- same as these two creins. Sadly, those answers are seldom sensible.
Though it is better than not to have international forums to foster dialogue and cooperation among nation-states, the contemporary global governance architecture does not overcome the territorially and politically fragmented structure of the nation-state system.
ISIS and Boko Haram may be having better success.
In fact, global governance projects and reinforces nation-state politics at a worldwide scale.
In the same way that local governance projects are reinforced by national politics.
International politics isn’t ‘carried out for the sake of world interests,’ remarks the political philosopher Zhao Tingyang
an equally useless Berggruen associate of these two cretins
in All Under Heaven (2021), ‘but only for national interests on a world scale.’
Worse yet, nations serve the interests of the individuals who comprise their citizenry. What is truly unforgiveable, however, is that people wipe their own bum rather than seeking to wipe the bum of all sentient beings and various planets and asteroids.
Managing world-scale, or planetary, problems, however, requires acting for ‘world interests’.
No. It requires actually managing stuff. Anyone can talk bollocks. As for 'world interests', they have nothing to do with virtue signaling or shitting higher than your arsehole.
Thus planetary problems require solutions at the planetary scale.
No. They require scientific solutions. Not yet more bullshit from academo-bureaucrats or cunts wo work for some stupid billionaire's foundation.
The scale of these problems is incommensurate with our current institutional capacity to govern them.
No. Countries which can do lockdown and mass vaccination can do pretty much anything else. Countries which can't don't matter.
Managing problems at the scale the planet, therefore, requires creating governance institutions at the scale of the planet.
Nonsense! There are plenty of 'problems at the scale of the planet'- e.g. those of the world wide web or Elon Musk's Starlink. More generally, trade and 'local arbitrage' are enough to knit together the entire world together. A World Government could create global 'governance institutions'. But to get to a World Government requires thinking not just like a planet but also like a Solar System which has been slut shamed by a Black Hole.
This doesn’t mean, however, that we’d be best served by a world government.
Because nothing whatsoever is meant by anything these cretins write.
We contend that each planetary problem requires its own planetary institution to govern it.
So, some cretin at the WHO should have had charge of COVID- right? The good folk of North and South Dakota and Arkansas and other States which refused to impose lock-down, would have been delighted to obey some African bureaucrat.
As a result, a planetary institution would have defined and restricted authority at the planetary scale over a specific planetary phenomenon.
Because American rednecks love Ethiopian bureaucrats and are just dying to comply with their instructions.
Planetary institutions, therefore, are not world government.
Like the WHO, they are useless unless they are otiose.
A world state would be a single, general-purpose governance institution with broad authority over the whole planet. What we envision is multiple, functionally specific governance institutions with narrow authority over particular issues.
So, they make a declaration and everybody ignores it. Cool.
At the same time, however, planetary institutions are not contemporary global governance. Global governance institutions today operate as multilateral associations of sovereign nation-states, which ultimately represent the interests of their member states.
Which is why they can sometimes appear effective.
Unlike the WHO and UNFCCC, planetary institutions should be more directly accountable to the interests of the planet as a whole.
Will the planet pay their wages? If they ask the tide to turn back or a volcano to stop erupting, will they be obeyed?
An example of an institution that could actually properly manage aspects of ‘world health’ on behalf of the entire world might be called the Planetary Pandemic Agency.
Will it be able to impose lockdowns and quarantines and institute compulsory vaccination programs? No. It will be useless. The fact is, even the Nation State which commands the loyalty of the great majority of its citizens can't impose an unpopular policy which affects millions. How many people can you jail? One in a thousand? Perhaps, in a rich country, you can go as high as one in a hundred. But if ten or twenty percent of the population defy an order, there is nothing the Government can do even it renames itself the Purrfectly Planetary Pussy Cat Agency for nice kittens who don't want to die horribly.
To be effective, this planetary health institution would need the capabilities and authority to act against infectious diseases anywhere on the planet.
Also, it would need x-ray vision and the ability to fly faster than the speed of light.
This requires monitoring of outbreaks and enforcement of preventative measures at all scales, from local to planetary – authorities that the WHO lacks. Such an agency, moreover, must have a planetary approach to health in the sense that it understands human health as interconnected with the health of animals, ecosystems and the Earth system.
in other words, it should know a bit about medicine. Dr. Tedros isn't a medical doctor. He has a PhD in 'Community Health' from the University of Nottingham. As a member of the Tigray Popular Liberation Front, he was made Minister of Health when his people came to power. Later, in 2022, Ethiopia's government accused him of helping his terrorist pals. It must be said, his outfit had been previously able to rearm by diverting famine relief funds to the purchase of weapons. Bob Geldof wasn't utterly useless after all.
So, it must be planetary not only in terms of scale but in terms of a holistic vision: that protecting our health requires protecting the planetary whole. (To its credit, the draft pandemic treaty promotes ‘a One Health approach … recognising the interconnection between the health of people, animals and the environment.’)
I think they went a bit over-board there. We understand that the thing was a smokescreen to distract attention from China's role in the spread of COVID. Still, just the economic demands would have been enough to sink the thing. There was no need for this illiterate woo woo shite. Still, as Hilary Clinton often said, it takes an African village to raise an African child because the Whites meanly fucked off.
Rather than focusing on isolated toxicities and pathogens, a planetary health institution that lives up to its mandate must keep front of mind that infectious diseases emerge from the place of humans in biogeochemical and ecological systems.
No. That is stuff local health authorities should be on the alert for.
The middle scale should be governed by nation-states tasked with managing the issues fit for their scale. Nation-states thus still have a role under our vision, but that role is much reduced from the present.
Also individuals will have a role under these cunts' vision. But that role would be as robots or obedient slaves.
Nestled in a broader multiscalar governance framework, nation-states will in fact likely be better equipped to succeed at the tasks and functions for which they are appropriate, namely, distributing and redistributing economic gains and losses.
Because that's what the Ethiopian government has been doing- right?
Economic governance – which is a political, not a technical, activity – has historically worked best at the national scale,
No. Scotland started doing better after it united with England and Wales. The EU was great for France and Germany, Belgium, etc.
where political institutions can facilitate collective life between the immense abstractness of the planetary and the place-based familiarity of the local.
We want our 'collective life' to be facilitated by cool new tech, not boring shitheads.
Building and supporting governance institutions at all scales, from the smallest face-to-face communities to the entire Earth, provides the foundation for adequate governance at all scales.
Also, we should arrange fitted carpeting and piped music for the entire planet.
It addresses the critique made by Elinor Ostrom, a Nobel laureate in economics, of the widespread assumption among policymakers ‘that only the global scale is relevant for policies related to global public goods’.
That follows from the definition of a public good as non-excludable and non-rival. But the global scale is irrelevant. The thing will be supplied if it is profitable, or otherwise rewarding, to do so in a local market.
Her pathbreaking work demonstrated that that effective management of large-scale problems requires work by large-scale, medium-scale and small-scale bodies.
Everybody already knew this. The problem of global hunger is solved at the micro-level by my ordering a pizza.
This is what our proposed architecture sets out to provide.
In our next book we reinvent the wheel. It should look like a cat but should say 'woof, woof.'
It offers a vision for one worldwide governance system, but not one with a unitary world governance led from one centre of power. Power, in our architecture, is dispersed among the units that need it to tackle specific problems.
I think these two cretins are confusing power with their own feces.
Our takeaway from the revelation of humankind’s planetary condition is twofold.
No. It is a turd.
We need to establish new governance institutions at the scale of the planet that are able to manage phenomena at the scale of the planet.
We need a DMV building which is 50 miles high.
But that isn’t the only implication. We must redesign the entire architecture of how and where governance decisions are made.
Now these cunts think they are architects. What's next? I suppose they will take up origami.
How can we organise such a complex system of governance? How should we decide which authorities should be allocated where? Our answer builds on the centuries-old principle of subsidiarity.
The Catholics came up with that word. It means fucking altar boys in the ass.
The principle of subsidiarity states that in a multilayered governance system, larger-scale institutions shouldn’t intervene in a decision or task unless and until a smaller-scale institution cannot do it themselves.
The Bishop should only intervene if the Vicar is having difficulty sodomizing small boys.
In other words, the authority to make decisions should be made at the smallest scale capable of functionally governing the issue at hand.
Unless people beat that authority to death.
Subsidiarity is in direct opposition to the status quo principle for the allocation of authority, state sovereignty, which gives all authority to nation-states.
No. It gives the State the monopoly of a kick ass Army and Airforce. Subsidiarity is stupid if there are economies of scope and scale or if there could be wasteful competition or rent contestation.
To be sure, sovereign states can then decide to delegate certain authorities, if they wish, to international organisations, subnational governments or private actors, but the international system today puts nation-states in the driver’s seat.
No. There is only an 'international system' to the extent that nation-states say it exists.
Every issue and function, regardless of whether states are well-suited to manage them, go to nation-states by default.
Unless they are shit. At the margin, most are.
Climate change, to take a pressing and archetypical planetary problem, is governed, in the end, by states. Even the 2015 Paris Agreement, the most important global climate accord, makes clear that the action comes from nation-states: ‘Parties shall pursue domestic mitigation measures, with the aim of achieving the objectives of such contributions,’ the diplomats wrote, leaving goal-setting and enforcement to each state.
By contrast the 2024 Fulham Agreement said that cats should enforce strict curbs on carbon emissions.
By contrast, subsidiarity understands that while states are good for some things, they aren’t good for everything.
Which is why we must turn to cats.
States should have authority over the issues that fit them,
People should be able to breathe in and breathe out. Sadly, some corpses are no longer doing so. We should ensure that dead people gain the authority to engage in respiration in an environmentally sustainable manner and in line with the principles of subsidiarity, niceness and not saying mean things about fat people.
but authority over other issues should move to institutions at other scales with a better fit. At the centre of the principle of subsidiarity is the message that in a diverse world there cannot be just one right answer.
Nor can there be just one right question or right as opposed to left or up as opposed to down or here as opposed to there.
Applying subsidiarity with our dawning recognition of our planetary condition generates a new principle for the allocation of authority: planetary subsidiarity.
This is because we can't delegate authority to other planets and also Mummy can't come and tie your shoe-laces once we're forty years old.
Planetary subsidiarity is the principle that we offer for allocating authority over an issue to the smallest-scale institution
the cat?
that can govern the issue effectively to promote habitability and multispecies flourishing. The principle provides a tool for assessing how to simultaneously address planetary challenges, such as pandemics and biodiversity, while at the same time maximising local empowerment.
definitely the cat.
How might this principle apply in practice?
In practice, things will be run the way things have always been run. There are incremental changes and fashions and fads but also quite useful mimetic effects.
Consider again the case of climate change.
Which requires massive action at the local level to prevent heat deaths etc.
The first thing to acknowledge is that climate change is a quintessential planetary issue.
No. It is a quintessentially economic issue. The human inhabitants of this planet have various ways to meet their energy requirements. After weighting up relevant 'externalities', we have decided it will be cheaper in the long run, all things considered, to replace fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy. Perhaps we should have done this sooner. Perhaps we would have done it sooner if the Environmental lobby hadn't engaged in egregious propaganda back in the late Sixties and Seventies.
Greenhouse gas emissions that take place anywhere have an impact everywhere.
Which is why cow farts matter. Lovelock proposed a genetically modified virus to kill off India's holy cows.
It doesn’t matter if carbon is burned in central Los Angeles or rural Laos,
or a cow farts in Texas or in Telengana, methane is still produced
once it enters the atmosphere it has consequences for the entire Earth system. As a result, the smallest-scale jurisdiction that can effectively mandate climate mitigation must encompass the whole planet. Yet that doesn’t mean that a planetary institution tasked with governing carbon emissions would take charge of the entire process. Instead, a planetary climate governance institution would take only high-level decisions – about, say, the maximum permissible carbon budget for the planet each year – and then turn over the implementation to smaller-scale institutions.
Which will ignore that budget because it isn't a money budget. People may do what they are paid to do and money for that must be found in a budget, but a carbon budget is like a budget of cuddles and kisses. It has no practical effect.
The planetary institution, in other words, makes only decisions that must be made at the planetary scale in order to be effective.
I make decisions about the planet all the time. I think Australia would look nicer if it was moved slightly to the left and tilted slightly. Sadly, my decisions aren't effective. Nor will be the decisions of any 'planetary institution' unless it can bribe or kill people.
Shifting our conceptual toolkit from the global to the planetary will take time and great effort.
No. It can be easily done. The problem is that there is no enforcement mechanism corresponding to that 'conceptual toolkit'. One might as well just send good thoughts into the ether.
But it is nothing compared with what it will take to transform our political system from one founded on the sovereign nation-state to one rooted in planetary subsidiarity.
What it will take will be the enslavement of the human race and the break up of families and linguistic communities. Either that or mass hypnotism.
It would represent a revolution in the governance of the world – and we do not have a map for how to get there.
In which case you are going nowhere with this stupid article.
Change must come the way it always comes, through new ideas and political struggle. Beyond that truism, however, we do not pretend to see a path for such a radical transformation of the basic structures of politics and governance.
Why not say 'everybody should stop being naughty and become very nice. In particular, they should stop farting and thus producing methane which is a greenhouse gas. Also they should demand that nation states be disbanded and several Planetary authorities should be set up. After that, everybody should learn to levitate and poop upon the heads of the authors of this shite.
In this, we find ourselves in good company.
If by 'good' you mean 'stupid'- sure.
Even ideas that eventually succeeded in transforming systems of governance often took many decades and even centuries to be adopted. The idea behind the League of Nations (established in 1920)
which failed miserably
and the UN (established in 1945)
which is failing miserably
lies with Immanuel Kant’s notion, from Perpetual Peace (1795),
which failed miserably. There was a little thing called the 'Napoleonic Wars' you know.
that ‘The law of nations shall be founded on a federation of free states.’
these cunts are Americans. They don't get that Kant was describing the US of A which greatly enjoyed massacring indigenous people and bringing in African slaves.
Forty years later, in his poem ‘Locksley Hall’ (1835), Alfred, Lord Tennyson could dream of ‘the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world’ where ‘the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, / And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.’
But the air would be terribly polluted from all the aero-planes flying around in Tennyson's vision. These silly cunts have forgotten that Tennyson was endorsing England's industrialization as well as a radical type of Chartism in 'Locksley'. In old age, he would revise his view.
But it took the cataclysm of the First and the Second World Wars to move this idea from the minds of philosophers and pages of poets to actual political institutions.
Nope. There was a 'Concert of Europe' after Napoleon was defeated which kept the peace and suppressed revolutions. Sadly, the struggle for the unification of Germany and Italy and the successful Hungarian uprising put paid to that scheme. The Great War marked the deathbed of the great Empires. Going forward, apart from the anomaly that was the Soviet Union, there would only be Nation-states.
Crises, like world wars, are often the midwife for institutional change.
Unless they aren't. Changing institutions during a crisis is a recipe for disaster. The scope of particular institutions may be increased or decreased under exigent circumstances. But institutions tend to be 'anti-fragile'.
Major changes to governance structures typically occur during or in the aftermath of disasters that push the existing institutional order to or past its breaking point.
A Revolution may usher in a new set of institutions. But they may be worse that what went before.
It’s a tragedy of politics that these changes generally come too late – that the crisis itself is what makes ‘impossible’ proposals finally seem not just reasonable but necessary.
Like what? The creation of the League of Nations? That failed. The creation of the UN? Every heard of the Korean War?
The science-fiction novel The Ministry for the Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson offers one scenario where a devastating heatwave killing tens of millions of people leads to the establishment of a creative new governance structure.
Well, if a science fiction novel says that's what will happen, it must be true. Actually, we are like to see a lot of tree planting and other such heat mitigating strategies in cities and other areas already suffering heat deaths. Essentially, acting locally on this issue to reduce fatalities, means less heat is reflected back. Sadly, this may not be enough. Some sort of satellite umbrella may be needed.
It isn’t difficult to imagine additional calamities for this planet.
We can’t predict what the galvanising catastrophe might be that brings about new systems of governance.
We can predict that there will be less silly money available to throw at stupid green ideas. Partly, this is because potentially very profitable solutions to the underlying problem appear to be coming on stream. Investors will shoulder aside the blathershites.
We must focus our efforts instead on defining a clear perspective on what planetary governance could and should be.
No. We must think about what, at maximum, could be achieved provided we rigorously exclude blathershites and countries which can't really contribute anything but which have a historical grievance because they were conquered some centuries ago by smarter people with better tech.
Holding such a vision in our minds may make it more possible to take advantage of the crisis that will all but inevitably arrive given the inadequacy of the current system. As we enter a period of not just geopolitical but geophysical uncertainty, calibrating our North Star – our vision of where we want to head – will be more important than ever.
In other words, it won't be important at all. Stupid people may make a bit of money working for some silly billionaire's Foundation. But there's real money to be made in the transition to a green economy. Talking bollocks must now take a backseat.
