Trope-a-Day: One World Order

One World Order: Averted.  Most species have more than one government.  Even the Empire, huge as it is and prone to casual memetic imperialism and absorption as it also is, has spawned splinters – not just the individual Renunciates and Renegades, but some actual other eldraeic governances created by minority factions that just couldn’t get along with the overall libertist-technepraxic consensus. (Given the predicates of said consensus, Imperial relations with these are usually, albeit not always, remarkably toxic – with the splinters being seen as something between heretics and just plain old bastard-coated bastards with bastard-flavored filling.)

Many governments also include more than one species.  Looked at either way, no-one speaks for all.

Also, even the supposedly all-encompassing Associated Worlds and Conclave of Galactic Polities don’t encompass everything.  The Voniensa Republic prefers to stand aloof from the whole situation, smug gits that they are, and horrified by the sheer lack of control of the whole thing.  There are plenty of still balkanized planets around, whether the countries have come together to create some international body to deal with offworld affairs or are each trying to conduct their own interstellar policy.  And, heck, encouraged by the fact that at least two of the major powers in the setting are functioning libertarianesque polities that shamelessly encourage this sort of thing, there are a lot of independent habitats out there that have taken advantage of the vastness of space to declare themselves the Sovereign Polity of Brad & Janet, pop. 5, or just straight-out sovereign not-owned-by-any-government individuals, m’kay?

Unity is not where it is at, today.

2 thoughts on “Trope-a-Day: One World Order

    • Well, “polity” might be overstating the case…

      The other big one is the “Rim Free Zone”, sixty to eighty systems depending on who’s counting and when out rimward in the Free Verge and Freeport Loop constellations; and the overstatement is because the RFZ is essentially pure ancap. It’s called that because they need to put something on the star charts, but it’s just a region dominated by individuals, corporations, and associations united by little but their refusal to acknowledge any form of governance.

      (Functioning-wise: well, it does okay, and is certainly better than a lot of the statist polities out there. It does, however, have the minor problem of being philosophically dominated by the local equivalent of idiot-dogmatic Internet Rothbardians, along with all the pathologies that said group prefer to handwave away, plus the big IP issue…

      It also doesn’t help them much that the Societies of Consent tend to absorb most of the freedom-minded people who are comfortable with emergent order and consensual cooperation and other such expressions of enlightened self-interest, predisposing their population somewhat towards the jackass side.)

      So, actual conditions there can – and do – vary both geographically and within geographies from “what an Imperial would call ‘almost civilized'” to “Jackson’s Whole”. Take your pick. No refunds.

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