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Communities and the right to secession
We envision ratings-based communities as voluntary organizations. People choose to join them voluntarily and can leave them at will. The US, as well as many other nation-states, have a joining process (ie green card, citizenship, etc) and a process of citizenship renunciation. For individuals, community-based processes will exist for these although we anticipate that it will be less bureaucratic, faster, and more informal. The ratings system itself will be able to do much of the vetting for joining a community. We also anticipate individuals having membership in multiple communities.
So the right to renounce a group membership seems relatively undisputed. We might invoke here the caveat that under extreme circumstances the right to leave might be restricted. A group member may have strategic knowledge and wish to provide it to an enemy, a group member may be so valuable to the community that his departure would significantly harm the liberties of everyone, etc. But under normal circumstances the right to leave seems uncontroversial.
It would then seem that the right of an entire group to leave would be the same and again, there doesn’t seem to be much dispute over this. Marginalized ethnic groups have migrated to other, more hospitable countries, throughout history. We might again invoke the caveat of extreme circumstances and note further that the ability to harm rises as the number of people choosing to leave rises. Thus it might be easier to reach the limit at which a community begins restricting the ability of a group to leave. Nevertheless, here too, it would appear that a group right to leave is mostly intact.
Why then would secession, which seems somewhat like a departing group, cause problems? Throughout history, seceding regions are often the cause of civil war. One clear difference is that the seceding region is taking with it valuable resources, such as land. It also takes with it citizens who pay taxes, serve in the government/military, etc. More fundamentally it renounces the laws of the parent nation and so takes with it all of the parent’s legal power over an entire sector of its territory. Citizens who renounce their citizenship but remain in their original country cause, by these measures, only a fraction of the loss that secession does. If they leave their original country, they may cause more loss but also do so at considerable expense to themselves. It is unusual for large blocs of people to agree to renounce their citizenship and move to a different country. Indeed, it is even unusual for them to renounce their citizenship en masse and stay. But even if they manage to do it (eg the Jews who formed Israel) they mostly leave behind the land and capital assets of the parent nation.
So the crux of the difference between secession and group renunciation of citizenship seems to lie in the economic and legal ramifications. A nation-state is nothing if not the ability to impose a legal framework over territory. And territory can be viewed primarily as an economic asset.
We’ve discussed that our ratings-based society will not necessarily have territorial boundaries. This may be the case, but it will certainly have control over economic assets in some fashion, whether this is land, productive assets like machinery, people (members), etc. It will no doubt have some legal binding of its members despite the fact that everyone agreed to it voluntarily and is free to leave. Secession therefore seems eminently possible in the community context. How would communities solve this problem?
One way would be to not worry about it and simply allow it. Or not mention it at all in the body of law that they create. The latter is similar to the US which never mentioned secession in its founding documents. The US example of ignoring the matter entirely led to the Civil War which adjudicated the issue on the battlefield and, only post-war, adjudicated it legally to favor the view that the Union is perpetual and unbreakable. That is, states could not secede, but this seems to have truly been decided by force.
But either of these situations (allowing it or ignoring it) sends us down a tricky path. Clearly ignoring it in plain sight (in the US case) is a bad idea. But simply allowing it causes problems too. If communities create a binding body of law for their members, as we presume they will, what does it then mean if secession is allowed? At any point of inconvenience, a member or a group thereof can simply throw off the yoke of oppressive law and start anew. And what does secession entail under this principle? A group of members could presumably “secede” by whatever process they see fit and start ignoring (ie violating) the laws of their parent community with the justification that they are now a new community. It would appear that this wouldn’t work either.
The only solution then is to codify in the body of law, along with the process for joining a community, the steps by which members can leave the community and, more importantly, secede from the community. This is what the EU does. It codifies in its own constitution the process of separation. And we saw recently with Brexit how this works and leads to a peaceful conclusion. Britain today lives side by side with the EU, is still friends with it, and has many other treaties which make it part of a broader European community. We might argue that Brexit was a bad idea but it did reveal how a relatively harmonious separation from a larger state can occur.
This brings to light a basic property of law which is that it must contain its own exceptions for those exceptions to be valid. The exception doesn’t exist by default if it goes unmentioned because if this were the case then anyone can break the law by “seceding” first and declaring the law void in their newly seceded “country”. Let's suppose John wants to kill his wife Linda but is afraid of the law. He "secedes" from his country and declares his house and property a new country, Johnland. Since there's no law about murder in Johnland, he proceeds to kill Linda. No doubt, the police would arrest John anyway and prosecute him. John would argue that the law on murder is not valid because he seceded and committed it in another country. Clearly, John's argument is ridiculous unless some codified process for secession actually exists.
This is apparently what the Confederate States (CS) ran up against when they tried to secede from the US. The US constitution ignores secession but the 10th Amendment provides that powers not given to the federal government are reserved by the states (or the people). Therefore, the argument goes, the CS could legally secede. So when they did, Lincoln, who did not believe that secession was legal, nevertheless allowed the seceded states to maintain slavery and was open to some type of negotiated settlement. So the CS’s procedural act of secession (declaring the fact, signing a new constitution, electing new leaders, etc) didn’t seem particularly harmful in and of itself. To the US, nothing much had changed, and constitutional law (and federal law) continued to be applicable in the CS. But then South Carolina decided to fire on Fort Sumter (a US fort), as it was being resupplied, in an attempt to drive US troops from CS territory. Now a law had been dramatically broken and the US had little choice but to counter it with force.
The Civil War truncated an interesting debate on whether states really had the right to secede. The answer, by the victor, was clearly no but this was only a conclusion drawn after the war. It seems fairly clear that if the US constitution had established a procedure for secession, the armed conflict could largely have been avoided. It also seems fairly clear that, by ignoring the subject entirely, the US made secession intolerable for itself (because we cannot have exceptions to the law that go unmentioned in the law) while permitting the other side just enough legal space to realistically entertain the notion.
This history is troubling and should be to a community of voluntary members. We normally would think, as the CS did, that we have a right by default if nothing in our law says we don’t. At the same time we can see the folly of unilateral separation as a means by which to break the law. This is why it is imperative that secession (and separation by members) be spelled out by the community.
But what if a community spells out terms that are so onerous that they can’t be practically fulfilled? Clearly, this is something a community must be aware of when it drafts its basic laws. But of course it could still happen, and we might find ourselves with seceding groups within communities that simply do so without attempting any legal justification of their actions. At the end of the day, if conditions are bad enough, force will prevail over any legal debate. However, given the potentially tragic outcomes of failing to address it adequately, it behooves any community to build a reasonable system of secession in from the beginning.
In general, communities should be aware of any potential for armed revolution, not just secession. The essence of preventing revolution is to allow a peaceful alternative that gives the revolution what it wants at less cost. Why has the US, for instance, been a relatively stable country for so long? One reason is that our democracy, and particularly our federal system, gives dissenters a path to get what they want at lower cost than armed struggle would. In other words, to anyone contemplating armed revolution against the US, it is likely that standard political action is more effective and a lot cheaper. It is also likely that if standard political action fails, that armed revolution would fail too. We may doubt if these conditions hold anymore in the US, but they did at one time, and if a conventional nation-state is capable of it, a direct ratings-based democracy should be too.
Contract as a method to mitigate the basic liberties imposition
There is a natural conflict between community needs and individual basic liberties. Sometimes, under exigent circumstances, the community will have to impose on its members to the point of taking away their basic liberties. In extreme cases this might include their life.
One way to ameliorate this problem is to have a contract upon admission to the community in which the prospective member agrees in advance to these impositions. If the member was “born into” the community then they would do so at the age of majority, eg 18. In the US, and most other countries, natural born citizens are generally not asked to sign any such contract. Naturalized citizens are asked if they would be willing to fight for the US but it is not clear what happens if they say no. The interviewing officer has quite a bit of latitude in asking the question in the mildest possible terms (pretend aliens are invading and threatening your children. Would you defend them?). In any event, the Q/A is not contractual. A ratings-based society, however, can create a proper contract upon membership and go over a comprehensive list of scenarios where the member might be asked to surrender their liberties.
This certainly helps and should be part of any member-community arrangement. But it does not completely resolve the moral problem of community imposition on individual liberties. One issue is that, according to Rawls (XXX), basic liberties are inalienable – in other words you can’t make a deal with someone in which you voluntarily forfeit your liberties. In a battle between an admittedly free contractual agreement and basic liberties, the liberties will prevail. This principle seems correct, at least when looked at broadly. If we think of basic liberties as the central foundation of our society, then it seems we shouldn’t allow individuals to chip away at them in deals that, while perhaps beneficial to them in the moment, end up corroding the benefit of liberty throughout all of society. We should also be suspicious of deals that may be the result of coercion (or coercive circumstances) or uninformed decision-making.
Of course, in some sense this principle is itself an imposition on individual liberty. But according to Rawls, liberty can be restricted under the condition that doing so protects or enhances the overall system of liberties. In this case the freedom to contract is subsumed by the very same basic liberties the contract would deny. Furthermore, the freedom to contract is seen (generally) as less fundamental than the right, for example, to free speech, political liberty, etc.
This brings up the conditions under which liberty can be restricted. We’ve mentioned the first one, that doing so must be in service to overall liberty. Another is that the restrictions be acceptable to those likely to make the sacrifice. This is an obvious case where contracts become important. We clearly need to ask and ensure that the people being affected (potentially the entire community) are ok with an imposition on their liberties. Alongside this condition is the proviso that the restriction be the mildest it can be to accomplish whatever community goal we seek the restriction for.
So contracts are necessary but still seem insufficient by themselves. The community, even after gaining contractual agreement, still has to tread very carefully in imposing on the basic liberties of its members. These include using the least restrictive means to accomplish the goals. They also include performing the imposition fairly, taking care of members who are being imposed upon, optimizing whatever policy is being pursued carefully to gain maximum benefit for minimal cost, etc. Contracts are a necessary part of this arrangement but the community has a duty of proper performance in many other related areas as well.
Intuitively, this seems right. Even if Bob has agreed in principle to serve in his community’s army in time of war, he will still feel imposed upon when he is drafted. It is better that he agreed, of course, but to more fully ameliorate the imposition he should see his community trying hard to lessen his sacrifice and optimally planning the policy he was asked to sacrifice for. Indeed, in his future with the community, the sacrifice should be remembered and compensated. Societies like ours who do a reasonable job of this (US in WWII) vs those who do not (US in Vietnam) see a large difference in how their veterans view the imposition.
Capital vs. Labor: a theory of society
The ratings based society should start with a theory for how society works in the first place. One view is that the key to societal function, particularly in a democracy, lies in the relationship between the owning class and the working class. This view is broadly Marxian although it is not necessarily Marxist. It is the reason why we have gravitated toward a moneyless society, rules for income distribution, and an emphasis on need as well as rated merit in distributing economic resources.
Although modern societies have come a long way since Marx wrote, they still bear out his essential insight: capital and labor are inherently in conflict. Society has little choice in this. Labor and capital are both required for society to function. And generally those who control the capital are not the ones who do the work, although as we will see, it is precisely on this point where change may be possible.
Furthermore, modern societies bear out the consequences of this relationship. The ones that treat their working classes the worst score lower in overall freedom and economic metrics such as HDI. The ones that treat them the best score the highest. Turns out it pays to treat workers well.
The advanced western democracies are witnessing what happens when we turn away from treating the working class fairly. As might be expected, they tend to get angry. However, as low information voters, they have not had the wherewithal to seek change in the correct way. This accounts for the MAGA movement, for instance. Its singular political accomplishment has been to project an image of working-class empowerment while skipping most difficult policy details or enacting policies that run directly against working class interests. It works because policy details are exactly what these low information voters are weakest on. There are some exceptions which exist precisely because they are so easily noticed: free trade and immigration. So Donald Trump was able to break with Republican orthodoxy on these points while basically towing an otherwise pro-corporate line (deregulation and lower taxes).
Our ratings system anticipates and encourages a correct relationship between capital and labor by subjecting these facets of society, like everything else, to ratings and votes. We reject the notion of an invisible “market” that limits our actions as the product of a disinformation campaign waged by interested parties. People create the rules by which society functions, period. Therefore the ratings system, which is the mechanism of rule creation (and evaluation), is the ultimate source of authority in a ratings-based society.
This is not to say that mechanisms to limit popular will shouldn’t be put in place. The people of a community should adhere to Rawlsian concepts of basic liberties and hold these as inviolate, no matter what their momentary passions may dictate. They should also build hysteresis (XXX) into their governance to avoid sudden drastic changes. The need for a proper balance between the CRS and an effective governance structure suggests itself.
Even if these ideas work, the working class also wants respect. In fact, they may want that more than anything else. Decades of neoliberalism (XXX) have not only hollowed out their economic prospects but also been accompanied by a distinct contempt for them held by professionals and elites. They are different: they don’t act or talk like we do (XXX). We look down on them.
Will the ratings system, one that seems to heavily favor those adept in processing information, treat the working class with the respect they deserve? We would hope first that the economic system created (XXX) by the ratings system would start by compensating workers fairly. This is step 1 and it will probably come naturally to any community-building effort as soon as any real work is called for. Almost nothing can be accomplished without the working class. Step 2, however, is to use heuristics and optimization techniques to minimize the cognitive load required for direct democratic governance. This will happen to everyone, not just the working class. Having input without requiring expertise will be an important step in making governance acceptable and modifying the language of governance to what normal people understand.
Ultimately respect evolves from cultural conditions. We can design an inclusive economic and governance framework but we cannot design cultural attitudes. We can only hope that the correct attitudes emerge from the designed frameworks and the realization that egalitarianism requires it.