nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

I must admit to having employed a bit of false advertising. In my last post, I explained how to carry out a process that will have the same results as a revolution; however, that is only one form of revolution, and not the one that commonly comes to mind when a revolution is mentioned. The common conception of ‘revolution’, which I will call a reboot, is a single, abrupt event of which the beginning and end can be easily pinpointed. The process that I described, which I will call a Roman revolution (remember that the Roman empire still called itself a republic), is not abrupt; instead of a quick surgical strike at the old order, it eats away at that order from within and, once it is gone, wears its skin Buffalo Bill-style, resulting in something that I suppose could be called, in the spirit of alliteration, a Gumb government. (Although it occurs to me that duocodical bureaucracy might be a better term.) The difference between a Roman revolution and a reboot should be obvious; it is clear that a Roman revolution has occurred in America, but, unlike with the American Revolution (a military reboot), no starting point can be named.

Due to their origins, Gumb governments can only take on certain forms: they outwardly appear to be identical to the governments they replaced, albeit possibly more bloated, while inwardly operating on what Tom Ball termed the Second Set of Books: the heuristics it uses in place of the laws that have become too unwieldy to enforce, the mechanisms used to justify the new order in the eyes of the old, and so on. Certain other forms of government are clearly impossible, or at least unrealistic, to bring about through Roman revolutions: to bloat a government until it shrinks is a contradiction in terms, unless the method by which it is expected to shrink is a reboot—a full replacement of the old order, structures, philosophy, and all, usually in the form of a revolution. (And obviously, the result of a reboot could not be a Gumb government!) So Roman revolutions may be viable roads to power for philosophies centered around one strong central government (a New Order, one could say), but what if the intended new order is not a New Order? If that intended order is sufficiently different from the old order, a reboot is clearly in order, but it’s not as simple as throwing the bums out. Nature abhors a vacuum, and, as Hobbes et al. made clear, power vacuums are no different. A reboot leaves an open playing field, on which you may well lose. Notice that nobody knows what’s going to happen in the Middle East; the bums have been thrown out, but it’s anyone’s guess as to whether the liberals, Islamists, or Martians will be next on the throne.

What, then, is to be done?

For a new order to take power after a reboot, it must already exist as a viable institution—a set of existing, developed organizations with the support of its subjects (or at least most of them), the capacity for self-defense, and the ability to govern and carry out the functions of government in the absence of the currently existing government. If your institution is currently viable, it can be called an ungovernment, since, by definition, it has the ability, but not the power, to act as a government. Parts of an ungovernment, or organizations that could be incorporated into an ungovernment were one to be built, can be called ungovernmental organizations, as can organizations that realistically could become such.

Ungovernmental organizations take many forms, from church organizations to local currencies. The one thing that they have in common is that they are all alternative organizations, not reliant on the government, that perform, or have the capability and the legitimacy to, in the absence of the currently existing government, perform functions normally delegated to the government.

So far, we have seen two sorts of revolution: the ungovernmental revolution and the Roman revolution. To this I would add a third, the übergovernmental revolution: the creation of, as the name implies, an institution (the übergovernment) encompassing multiple existing governments, followed by the gradual strengthening of said übergovernment at the expense of the sovereignty—that is, the governmental status—of the former governments, resulting in one übergovernment ruling over some amount of ungovernments. Übergovernmental revolutions have taken place in both America and Europe, but the American case shows some of the characteristics of a reboot.

But the question remains: what sorts of governments can be created through ungovernmental revolutions? For ungovernmental revolutions to have unlimited possibilities would break the pattern established by Roman revolutions, which create Gumb governments, and übergovernmental revolutions, which create federations.

Ungovernmental revolutions appear to be less limited, since they can bestow sovereignty upon any viable ungovernment, but it seems to me that ungovernments and ungovernmental institutions would be more likely to form, and more viable once formed, on a smaller scale and in areas with higher social capital, meaning that such revolutions would be most likely to bring about small, localist, communitarian governments of the sort advocated on sites such as Front Porch Republic.

That, for reasons that should be obvious, make them my preferred form of revolution. Especially since, if the reboot never comes, the ungovernmental institutions may very well be more effective than the equivalent governmental institutions; I live in an area where, when it snows, someone on the block will usually drive around in a pickup truck with a snowplow attachment and get the roads cleared days, sometimes weeks, before the government snowplows show up.