Welcome to the Avengers: Endgame moment of this blog, where I capitalize on all the previous articles¹, and disclose a cornerstone of the WST Societic Universe: the Metasociety.

The problem:

Before I define what this is, let me explain why I came up with it: As stated previously, we’re all different, and if the majority will conform to whatever normal is, a part of the population will always be at odds with the system in place².

For example, if you’re someone that believes everyone should be treated equally and properly, the ludicrous life of billionaires while plenty of people live in miserable conditions might cause you… distress³. As a result, you might be more attracted to socialism, as it promotes the idea of social justice, than to more liberal systems.

The key idea is that, if you don’t fit the society you’re (more often than not) forced to live in, you will greatly suffer. Whether because you’re getting marginalized, or because you simply don’t possess the skills needed to survive in this environment. This can create resentment from both sides⁴, triggering cycles of violence and unrest, weakening society overall.

Those outcomes aren’t bright, but seems avoidable with two conditions:

• Numerous types of society exist.
• People can switch freely between them.

Now, you might point out there are multiple societies already, and people can travel between them. Although it’s correct, diversity isn’t great and there are places where travel is heavily restricted and/or economically unattainable for many of its inhabitants.

Even if we magically removed those barriers, the cost of changing countries goes beyond economics. You’re far from your family and friends, you may need to learn a new language, get accustomed to a new culture, survive the endless red tape of bureaucracy…

Also, how exactly do you know which society is better for you? It’s not like there’s a “society world’s fair” where you can learn about the pros and cons of each one. The list of issues doesn’t stop here: What if they don’t accept foreigners? What if none correspond to you?

100% genuine, totally legit poster.

The solution(‘s problems):

Hence, we need to create something to address this problem:

The Metasociety, is the name given to the weave of societies resulting from the possibility of anyone, any community, to spontaneously create a new society of its own, or join any preexisting one.

By democratizing the creation and switching of the social system, we should fix the aforementioned issues. But here comes a new plethora of challenges if we want to turn this from “crazy idea from random internet dude” to a practical solution⁵

Before that, let me clarify: what I’ve been meaning by society, is the set of rules that organize the way we live in a particular group of people/state/community. They can be either explicit, think laws and regulations, or implicit, like the social “norm” we saw in the normality article.

In this sense, switching society means changing the rules that you abide by, social rules (your freedoms and obligations), economic rules (the taxes you pay, how labor works), political rules (how those rules are decided on, how you’re represented)… you get the gist.

The first problem I see is: the more societies we’ll have, the more complicated and inefficient things will probably be. Bureaucracy is already Kafkaesque, I can’t imagine if we add an extra layer of unbound clutter on top.

In other words, we’ll need to restrict the creation of new societies only when there is a “strong enough” need for an “adequate amount” of people. Those values will have to be tweaked to find a compromise between having a functioning system while minimizing the core issues it’s supposed to solve.

Next, once societies are created, we need to consider how people join and switch. Specifically, we must anticipate possible abuses of the system, like living year long in a society with a universal basic income and switching temporarily into another one to avoid paying the taxes that fund the UBI.

At least two kinds of restrictions should be set in place:

• A limitation in the amount/frequency of switching. Sadly, this contradicts the “easy switch” to solve our initial problem, so again, another difficult compromise to make.
• (Optional) barriers to entry in some societies. Same issue as above, but this could be avoided by restricting the barriers to strictly necessary ones, with an emphasis in limiting “hard” barriers that would forbid switching completely.

Now, where there are rules, there’s an authority to enforce them. This will be done by a central authority whose role would be to manage all matters specific to the Metasociety: the creation and switching of societies and solving inter-society conflicts to ensure a good cooperation among them.

Because yes, the goal is also for all those societies to play nice with each other, I’m not a big fan of war you see. Some amount of rivalry will probably be inevitable though, but if they’re interdependent enough, without competition for access to resources, then we should have a somewhat stable world order like we have at the time of writing⁶.

Another pillar of conflict-prevention will be CFDA, placed at the core of the Metasociety. This will also be helpful to organize and classify the different societies, which is needed by itself and helps with our “how do you know which society is made for you” problem we saw above.

Societies would be sorted based on how much they have in common, a bit reminiscent of a phylogenetic tree, with branches for every fundamental difference. For example, a branch for “traditionalist” societies that wants to strictly restrict technology usage⁷ and another for the more “laissez-faire” ones.

An example phylogenetic tree for some primates (including us).

The glaring issue with this representation is whenever there are two societies in different branches that have more common traits than their neighbors. In biology this happens generally because of convergent evolution, but it’s not an issue because the history of life is the defining factor, not simply the amount of overlapping traits.

In our case, we’ll need to rank the differences to define the main hierarchical separation, and maybe make use of 3D or colors to get additional information across. Defining this could be its own article, so let’s move on.

If you need an example of what kind of new society we could have, you can check my first article where I define a blueprint for my ideal society. Crucially, I realize it won’t suit everybody (so do the existing ones), hence why I’m writing this article.

Next, we need to address how the Metasociety and its societies evolve with time. At both levels, we’ll have things you are familiar with:

• A fundamental piece of legislation that defines the core principles: A (meta)constitution.
• A set of legislation that defines all the rules of the (meta)society.
• A group of people charged with enforcing the rules: A (meta)government.

The constitutions should be almost impossible to modify, as they’re the reference points to classify the societies. They also define how the government is chosen, e.g: if it’s an elected body or there is none at all. As for the legislation, it’s defined by the government and is expected to evolve with time to adapt to changes in a society’s environment.

Similarly, the metaconstitution will define how the metagovernment is chosen⁸, how the system works and contain common core principles like Human Rights. This metagovernment roles are:

• Defining and enforcing the rules about society creation, joining and switching.
• Approving creation and modification of society’s constitution.
• Monitoring the respect of a society’s own constitution.
• Monitoring the respect of the common core principles by societies.
• Overseeing potential conflicts between societies.

If they do infringe these rules, the metagovernment should have coercive power, otherwise we’ll end up with UN v2.0 and that’s definitely not what we want. Beside all that, it won’t have any regards on a society’s internal affairs.

Another mind-bending possibility is a group of societies forming their own sub-metasociety, with everything we talked about just replicated a layer below. The reason to do this would be a stronger common constitution, while still allowing societal variations.

Say, the metasociety only incorporates Human Rights in its constitution. Maybe a group of societies feels strongly against speciesism, and wants to generalize HR to every living organism. They can form their own sub-metasociety that only includes the updated “Every Species Rights” text in their constitution.

Obviously, this adds another administrative layer in an already crowded lasagna. It will require a lot of cleverness to make this viable, and we’ll need mandatory limits to the amount of sub-metasociety branching to limit complexity.

It gets even more ludicrous:

By now, you might have noticed I’ve been avoiding a key issue: location. Didn’t I say earlier that moving to another country was a problem in itself? Well, the solution is simple, don’t bind a particular society to a particular location.

It may sound ridiculous and that’s because we’re used to linking a country with the power to define its society, which is the result of the “if you rule the land, you rule the people” rule found throughout history. That’s simple to grasp, but it’s not without issues.

For instance, your way of life may be drastically different depending on which set of borders you’re born in. I particularly despise that some will live destitute while I get to comfortably sit writing this just because I lucked out at birth⁹.

"From up here, you can't see any borders, or countries or armies. All you can see is the earth." - Planetes, the anime

So why not kill two birds with one stone and get rid of the power/place coupling while we’re at it? In practical terms, it means societies are distributed and mixed around, that your neighbors might be living in completely different rules than yours.

You can certainly see the headache coming to make this work already. How do you control people somewhere when everyone follows different rules? What if some of your rules are antagonistic to your neighbors’? Wouldn’t it make conflicts inevitable?

When it comes to the neighbors issue, it’s probably overblown. We already live different lives, we just don’t acknowledge it, and while conflicts do happen they’re rare as the majority of us try to make it work.

The real problem is making everything work locally, and for that we’ll need local power. I know, I said we’d remove power from countries, but I never said all of it, it makes sense to leave local authorities to deal with local issues, like land and resources management.

Actually, the amount of power to trade is yet another hard compromise we have to make, since ultimately, most rules have to be enforced wherever people are, at the local level.

For example, take gun ownership/carrying, some societies are very restrictive while others are notoriously favorable. It would be a nightmare to handle those two opposites at once, so maybe this issue is better off left in the hands of local authorities. Sadly, doing so reintroduces the physical anchors to society we were trying to get rid of.

To simplify this tough balancing act, we could prevent the cohabitation of societies too different from another, alas doing so kind of defeats the purpose of the whole thing, so it would be a last resort.

At this point you’ll probably realize there’s no way we could implement this, it’s plain utopia. We’d need to gain virtually everybody’s approval, which is downright impossible, and that’s before accounting that we’re asking current governments to cede some/most decision-making power to a third party.

If you wonder how it would go, you just need to check the state of current international institutions, or the lack of bindings in agreements countries voluntarily signed themselves. Hello the Paris Agreement, the Geneva Conventions, the Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty…

Let’s just say, things don’t look too bright, especially since, even if we miraculously achieved that, we have no guarantee the Metasociety will solve the problems I envisioned it for, let alone constitute a functional system.

Depressing, I know, but don’t close your tab just yet. After all, the concept has value by itself: we could bump from it and design a more realistic alternative, and/or reduce our ambitions to roll it out, albeit on a smaller scale.

We would convince (read: pay) a small state/administrative region, to implement Metasociety with a limited, fixed set of societies, such that citizens have some diversity to pick from while being easily manageable. We could even leave the role of metagovernment to the original authorities, leaving them final say to sweeten the deal.

Hopefully, after a few decades, this would yield satisfying results on the issues it’s supposed to solve. Which, in addition to the experience gained on how to roll out and manage the system, will help convince other regions. Scaling everything up, over the next few centuries, to finally conquer the entire world!

Wrapping-up:

Of course, we’re only scratching the surface here, as they’re tons of problems I don’t foresee. Still, I believe the Metasociety has potential to solve the frustration resulting from living somewhere that doesn’t suit you. Improving world stability overall, if done correctly.

It also has other benefits we haven’t discussed yet, like the possibility to channel irreconcilable ideological differences among a population that would have otherwise led up to political deadlock. Think about conservatives and liberals endlessly fighting over abortion rights in the United States¹⁰.

That being said, I have to recognize, it comes with operational challenges that are seemingly impossible to solve, in its uncompromising form at least. Even before asking ourselves how it could be accepted by the powers currently in place.

Maybe it will be tested on a small scale one day, maybe it will fail to solve anything, maybe it will become the de facto global system in the future human galactic empire, maybe all civilization will collapse before we can attempt anything. In any cases, one truth remains: We live in a society.

Bonus game: If you correctly hand count the number of “society” in this article, you gain a free cookie!¹¹

Non-contractual picture.