I took a suggestion from jacob66 and simplified it. Should there be a single government that controls all of humanity? You could look at examples in science fiction such as the Hegemony in the Ender's Game universe (Enderverse) by Orson Scott Card, or the Atreides Empire in Dune by Frank Herbert. Or instead of spanning the universe, or the Federation in Star Trek. Maybe it could be just a global government that's united against an alien threat. Can't think of any examples off the top of my head that's outside the realm of science fiction...

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Question: You're in a game show and have to choose if you'll play the risky bonus round for more money. What do you do?
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A just ruler amongst tyrants

HELL NO! If you want "real world" examples, there's the League of Nations, the U.N., NATO, and the EU. All of them are failures.

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Those aren't examples though. Those are organizations that nations joined to try and work together. It's not a single world government

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A just ruler amongst tyrants

If you look at a list of the deadliest wars in human history, they mostly fall into three categories: the world wars, large scale conquests, and civil wars in countries with big populations. Any war in a world with a single government would pretty much combine all three.

So in order to support a single world government, one should be convinced that humanity has become sufficiently united and peaceful that war would no longer happen. Given that there's currently a war of choice being waged to popular acclaim ("End the quarantine, start the war!" ), I don't see how anyone who pays attention could harbor such belief.

My main reason for rejecting "global government" is that when it inevitably becomes disconnected and makes bad decisions, there will be nowhere left to run. It would be, by far, the largest, richest, and most powerful organization of any type to ever exist and there would basically be no way to keep it accountable.

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I suppose that speaks for itself...and these are the people that have voting rights...



I'm going for "yes" because if there's just one government, then there should be no wars since there are no countries to fight with.
Of course, could still be rebels and what not because nothing is perfect and there will always be those who complain, but no large scale battles and such.
And wars is what I hate the most for they are nothing but some jackasses greed that costs the lives of innocents.

Of course, a single world government would create it's own problem like @orochijes said - who'd then control it should it become overreaching?
For it to be even fictionally real without any revolutions it'd take lots of time and minds to figure out a system that would have checks and balances.

The idea itself isn't bad, thou if it were possible, there would be no need for it since in that case countries could get along without wars anyway, but sadly, humans are such disgusting creatures that it would never work out.
There will always be those assh*oles who want more and can't stand when someone does better than them thus sabotages it all.
Plus, unfortunately, majority of people seem to be not that bright and sadly, masses have the bigger vote and are difficult to deal with since they simply do not comprehend.

Only example I can think of is if we had a single leader who'd truly think about the world & people and had the power to make it happen, but sadly, then there would be those jackasses who'd never agree with it and ruin it...
kinda reminds me of Laura Thalassa's The Fallen World series.

Honestly, the more I think on this, the more depressing it becomes - there are too many greedy jerks & morons in this world for there to be peace, single government or multiple governments. Alas, if only the truly good ones remained...eh... it's just an utopia.

Last edited by Rouzmary at 2:27 pm, Oct 24 2020

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~Nothing is Eternal but Eternity~
Enjoy life as much as you can and do whatever you want, because it may be only one.

I can’t think of a single reason why that would be good, TBH.

-Bureaucratic nightmare
-Impossible to represent the values and interests of all but a fraction of citizens
-Presumably corrupt, since no one would want a global government unless they were personally benefiting
-Constant uprisings due to the above

If you look at a list of the deadliest wars in history, Chinese civil wars make up maybe 6 out of the top 12. The Russian revolution could also be in the top 12, depending on which sources are more accurate. This pattern holds for regions where conflicts are generally smaller, too. A majority of high casualty wars in Africa are civil wars—a vast majority if you count wars of independence and civil wars that sprawl into regional conflicts, such as the Second Congo War—I'm not counting those, but from the perspective of a single world government, they'd be little different.

In short, civil wars tend to be quite deadly, probably because both sides are more likely to view the stakes as existential and thus are less likely to surrender or negotiate an armistice. Under a single world government, that's the only kind of war we could have—and it'd be the largest civil war in human history.

There is no organization that is infallible to corruption. It would just give the most powerful people in the world even more power. Unless there is a way to give every single citizen power under this single government? Not sure how to express this...

No. God Emperor of Dune examines why that would be the worst tyranny in the history of humanity but it's obviously a star system wide single government. The novel version of Brave New World is another examination of this. Does The Matrix count, lol.
The US Civil War is a great historical example. One government with a clear center and about a million deaths due to a 4-year war that only lead to the same government being reformed. Aha.
At least slavery ended in the US. Kind of.

You would need to chug religion down the drain, 7+ billion people (and growing) would need to agree on a set of stringent values that can´t much evolve after they are set up and the bureaucracy would move like a snail. The different continents and climates also have different needs and someone would need to balance them out on the same level. About that... You would need to make all sorts of reparations, as Germany is still doing for Israel, to make this work. China, the UK and the US would have their work cut out for them to make up for all the misery they caused in recent memory if we establish the modern world as something that emerged after WW2. Sorting out the Middle East is another problem. Africa too, I guess. And good luck finding the right World Controllers and getting rid of corruption forever.

The deduction that the League of Nations, the U.N., NATO and the EU are single government bodies is the most embarrassing statement I have read all year on this site. Only the League of Nations further failed.

PS: We aren´t the only intelligent life on the planet. Is a single government goona help the animals? It's them and the planet itself who are hurting most right now. Of note:
David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11989890/

Last edited by residentgrigo at 7:58 pm, Oct 24 2020

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I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
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From what I've read, seen, and experienced, "utopia" is an impossibility for two reasons. First reason is that learning requires FAILURE. If failure happens, then how can something be called a "utopia"? It's a contradiction, it's a paradox. You cannot have perfection if fault is still possible. The second reason is that no one can actually agree on what the "perfect utopia" will be. Even among groups of like minded people, there will still be disagreements on how certain aspects of society should act, from something as simple as the color of their clothing to something as radical as the civilization's attitude towards agriculture.


That's how the U.S. started out, and you've seen the results. Originally, you had the district, city, county, state, and federal government all in charge of different levels of the society, all being checked and blocked by each other, no one having "all" the power, and giving the citizen different levels of representation and power to rule over the government. However, as you've probably noticed over the past several years, all that power has been pushed to the top. While the district, city, and country governments still "do their job", and the populace still have most necessities, much of the current "power" now resides with the state (If it isn't already handled off to the Fed) governments.

Just look this election. People are bitching about what Trump is "doing to the country", BUT all that power is given to him by Congress. If everything he is doing is "so terrible", then why don't people jump on Congress for not making any laws that deprive Trump of his power? Or, if anything Trump is doing is potentially in violation of previous laws, then why don't average people take it all the way up to the Supreme Court for them to declare that the President is overstepping the power he is given?

Speaking of which, there's also the fact that people are bitching about the current SC nominee, acting like the SC can make law, when that is the sole job of the congress. The SC's ONLY job is to rule if a law or action by any division of the U.S. government (All the way down to the district governments) is in violation of (In order of importance) the 27 U.S. Amendments, U.S. Constitution, and any previous laws (Thereby making the violating law or action mute). The SC cannot make any laws whatsoever, the most that they can do is "interpret" how the law can be put into practice.

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Voted a definitely nope. Sounds like something like Brave New World, imo.

I really don't want to put much thought into it because I'm gonna end up overthinking, but I do not think it would be the best idea simply because too much territory is too much for a single government to handle, it can become too disconnected, and the answer to that is to of course put representatives in other places, which isn't always the best option. Also for it to really work people would need to have the same kind of thinking that a single government is a good way to rule, and that sounds pretty unrealistic if you ask me.

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ive got a disease called having a big brain and excellent taste.

I rarely update my lists by this point.

No mmm...

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I will change this world mmm...
So the world can change me mmm...

Given the context of our technological progress, we should most certainly be ruled under a single government within the next century or two.

What mostly everyone in here is missing is that our current definitions of "normal" are by no means absolute truths to our existence as humans. Arguments against a global government that center around historical examples of wars, corruption, and the failure of central governments are moot in the face of a future that's completely unlike anything we've experienced to date.

Our current forms of government would be just as ridiculous to the ancient city states or hunter gatherer clans of pre-history. I don't think anyone would make the argument that our societies are currently ready for anything of the sort. There are still too many divisions and differences.

However, we live in an unprecedented time. Within the next decade or two, the majority of all humans that live on this planet will be able to instantly communicate with one another (we're at around 4 billion internet users now, expected to hit 7+ billion by 2030). That is a societal revolution on the level of the first human settlements. Coupled with advances in machine learning and compute power, language barriers will be a thing of the past within our lifetimes.

One inevitably of this new technological revolution is the homogenization of our species. Just look at this site as an example. It's a place where people from all over the world come to get updates on a specific subset of Japanese literature. Many of us who have been reading manga and watching anime for a long time now have an insight in Japanese culture and society that would be non-existent had we not been exposed to the mediums.

That is where our species is trending. Towards mutual understanding and co-operation. The current divisions we're seeing are the dying throes of the 20th century. Our concept of a government is something that was created hundreds of years ago. Something like a central government in the modern/future era would be worlds apart than what our current concept of government is. We wouldn't just take what we have now and scale it up. That would fail, and massively. We would need to restructure everything from the ground up. From how we elect leaders, to how information is managed, to how wealth is distributed (and the whole concept of wealth in general).

Just think about how much our world will change in the next 20 years alone.. We've got the aforementioned network connectivity that's coming to much of the developing world. Then we've got technologies like 3d printing that will provide communities within the developing world access to a wealth of modern commodities that are currently out of their reach - from 3d printable water filters to 3d printable housing and electronic goods.

There's also the aforementioned machine learning and automation that are set to replace upwards of 15% of all existing jobs while generating fewer jobs than any other form of automation in the past. Next is the global race to develop fusion energy, which would provide a limitless and scalable form of energy generation that will more than likely be one of the "last" major energy developments our species will see (harnessing the same power that stars do). And even excluding fusion, renewable energy is already the cheapest form of energy in history, and it's only getting more cost effective due to improvements in the manufacturing process that will keep providing gains for decades.

Every single technology mentioned above, on it's own, has world changing potential. Some of them are already making giant waves in the way we function as a species. Yet they're all coming online (other than Fusion probably) and maturing at the same time. They'll all compliment one another, and further increase their benefits. A remote village in Liberia that currently struggles with access to water could 3d print the majority of a water filtration system using schematics downloaded using StarLink, power it with cheap 3d printed solar panels, and ship in all the relevant materials delivered using a fleet of long-range drones. They could print water pipes, TV's and a variety of other complicated electronics and infrastructure - all without any expert help or assistance. Complex projects could be performed remotely with the aid of 3d-printed robots or augmented reality goggles. And the whole project could be live-streamed to youtube, with live translation into English.

And those technologies are only touching the tip of the iceberg. There are so many wildcards, from bran-machine interfaces, to new super-materials like graphene, to the revolution currently happening within the genetic engineering community.

So yeah, a global government certainly doesn't make sense now, but how about a few generations after the entirety of the world has had some time to develop and understand one another better? When we can no longer label someone halfway around the world as a terrorist without also seeing the humanity behind them. When energy is easily accessible and nearly free, or when the majority of work can be automated.

The future we'll be living in 20, 40, 60 years from now will be nothing like our current world. Just like a world government will be unlike any form of government that's existed to date. From quantum encrypted online voting systems, to hundreds of thousands of representatives from all over the world, to AI algorithms that monitor for misappropriations of funds or condense government decisions into easily digestible news that keeps voters more aware than ever.

There's still always going to be hierarchy. Most likely it would be the way it is now but with more global standards of living and global economy control. Of course there's corruption with power but if you want to avoid that then fuck it all and just go back to villages. So YES, theoretically, if someone trustworthy could work out the constitution or whatever they use.