Governments protect us and our country’s borders and therefore need to have a monopoly on force and foreign policy. The other story is that governments are organizations, dependent on dictatorships-known-as-businesses.^∇ That is the way story goes.

What we do need, and always emerges is governance. A way to collaborate, live, and work together. You don’t need governance if you are stranded on an island by yourself. The only “agreement” you can have with the other dangerous animals on the island is, If you come near me and you scare me, I will slaughter you. But that doesn’t work with people. You need governance with people.

Governance is about collaborating to create and change those agreements, our ability to transform the culture.

Rules and Punishment

Making up rules that others must follow is easy to do, but harder to implement. Most of the time we end up using some form of punishment for people who don’t follow these rules. We use different levels of pain: litigation, penalties, prison. That holds a majority of people back, but only for a while. Eventually, when following the rules is more painful than the pain of raising hell, people revolt.

In dictatorships, people revolt violently and lethally because that is what they have learned and what they know works. In places that lean towards democracy, people also revolt, but through non-violent, non-lethal ways, like assembling, protesting, and voting. Because that is what they know works.

Governance, Not Government

When I wrote rGov,^∇ there was no distinction in my mind between government and governance. I wish I had figured it out then because governance is what we want.

ENDNOTES

• Matt Perez, Adrian Perez, Jose Leal. radical-for-the-impatient. May 2022. <https://radicalcompanies.com/2022/05-03/radical-companies-for-the-impatient>

• Matt Perez. rGov: Unpolished Thoughts. May 2022. <https://radicalcompanies.com/2022/05/05/rgov>