Lets’s Build…a Country
In “How to Start a Country,” Balaji Srinivasan shares why we need to start new countries and how.
Below, I extend his ideas on both why and how. On why: because our long term survival demands the variety of ideas, cultures, technology, and social structures that new countries will allow us to generate. On how: by striking agreements that generate mutually winning outcomes.
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On why
All complex systems in complex, changing environments experience a cycle of life and death. To escape death—to revitalize, to regenerate, to be reborn—the system requires variety in its key units. The complex system that is humankind doesn’t have enough variety in its key unit, countries—or more generally: self-contained polities. Starting new countries—lots of them—addresses that limitation and increases our long term odds of survival.
Balaji discusses our innate desire to create, whether that’s buying vacant land, starting new countries, or creating a digital currency. He also mentions the value created from new countries, suggesting that the value creation from new countries should be far larger than that from creating new companies (just as the value creation from new currencies appears, at least on early trajectories, to be on track to exceed the value creation from new companies).
I agree with these points but believe the need to create new countries is even more fundamental: humanity’s long term survival depends on it.
That may sound like hyperbole, but let me show why that’s the case by illustrating a recurring pattern that appears in seemingly disconnected domains: how cycles of death and rebirth move society forward.
The pattern appears consistently in stories, nature, and the study of complex systems. The reason it appears with such startling consistency is because it reveals a deep wisdom that is crucial to the long term success of any complex system. And because humankind is a complex system, the pattern shows us what is important for our long term survival.
I’m currently re-reading The Lord of the Rings, and the pattern appears in Bilbo’s poem about Aragorn, hinting at one theme of the book:
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.
In fact, Frodo’s entire journey fits a pattern that occurs with amazing regularity in humanity’s major myths, religions, and stories. Joseph Campbell was a mythologist that studied an incredible range of these stories and described this pattern, calling it the hero’s journey.
The hero’s journey is fairly simple: a hero is called to adventure (often by and with a helper), crosses symbolic thresholds, experiences adventures, reaches a low point (the abyss), experiences a deep change, learns or gains something significant and valuable, and returns home changed, delivering something of value to the people or resolving a crisis.
Dante’s Inferno, the Odyssey, Star Wars, and the origin stories of most of the major religions are just some of the examples that fit the pattern.
While many focus on Campbell’s work because of this archetypal pattern for stories, a closer read of his work reveals the pattern is much more fundamental. It tells a story of society’s tendency to stagnate and the actions required to revitalize it—to drive regeneration and rebirth. That process of rebirth is the hero’s journey as Campbell describes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (emphasis mine):
The hero then is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved. As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be—if we are to experience long survival—a continuous “recurrence of birth” (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death…
By referring to Arnold Toynbee, Campbell links this recurring pattern in stories to history. The study by Toynbee he refers to is A Study of History. Toynbee argued that the survival of civilizations depends on Creative Minorities that have the ability to provide solutions to problems. But those groups, once successful, tend to ossify, becoming Dominant Minorities.
The implication of Toynbee’s work is that a civilization, in order to maximize its chances of survival, has to actively foster and nurture many Creative Minorities—many different experiments, or outliers from the mainstream, from which potential solutions, or sources of rebirth, may emerge.
If you consider Creative Minorities as mutations, Toynbee’s theory sounds a lot like Darwinian evolution. Nature solves the problem of stagnation by regularly mutating genes, creating new versions of species. Most of these variants do not survive. But some survive. And some are key to survival of the entire species, allowing them to adapt to changing circumstances.
Variations of this pattern show up in strategy (The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen), complexity economics (The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur), political science (The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama), and others.
The best explanation I’ve found for why this pattern is so fundamental is in Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile, specifically, Chapter Four: “What Kills Me Makes Others Stronger,” where Taleb explains:
In a system, the sacrifices of some units—fragile units, that is, or people—are often necessary for the well-being of other units or the whole. The fragility of every startup is necessary for the economy to be antifragile, and that’s what makes, among other things, entrepreneurship work: the fragility of individual entrepreneurs and their necessarily high failure rate.
He continues, presenting the idea of layers and hierarchies as key to survival (emphasis mine):
A natural organism is not a single, final unit; it is composed of subunits and itself may be the subunit of some larger collective. These subunits may be contending with each other. Take another business example. Restaurants are fragile; they compete with each other, but the collective of local restaurants is antifragile for that very reason. Had restaurants been individually robust, hence immortal, the overall business would be either stagnant or weak, and would deliver nothing better than cafeteria food—and I mean Soviet-style cafeteria food. Further, it would be marred with systemic shortages, with, once in a while, a complete crisis and government bailout. All that quality, stability, and reliability are owed to the fragility of the restaurant itself.
So some parts on the inside of a system may be required to be fragile in order to make the system antifragile as a result. Or the organism itself might be fragile, but the information encoded in the genes reproducing it will be antifragile. The point is not trivial, as it is behind the logic of evolution. This applies equally to entrepreneurs and individual scientific researchers.
The Disney movie Moana provides a great example that links Campbell’s hero’s journey and Taleb’s idea of antifragility through layers.
The story itself follows the hero’s journey perfectly: Moana’s island experiences a challenge (shortage of food due to a mysterious darkness); she’s called to an adventure (by her grandmother and the ocean); she crosses a threshold (the waves she could not previously pass); she is accompanied by a helper (a demi-god); she experiences many challenges; she falls into an emotional abyss; she is transformed (symbolically as Te Ka transforms to Te Fiti); and she returns the source of life to her people.
But the story is also an allegory for the Polynesian people’s basic strategy for survival. The Polynesian people lived on islands, and any one island could become uninhabitable or overpopulated. So they developed a culture and craft of seafaring by which they would discover new islands. Many boats sailed in search of new lands. Many, if not most, did not survive. But some did, discovering new, habitable islands. These were the heroes on whom survival depended.
The Polynesians needed to send forth not tens or hundreds of such voyages but thousands. If they knew that many would fail, then they needed more in order for some to succeed. Quantity mattered.
Similarly, we need many more countries to discover the radically new ideas, cultures, technologies, and social structures that will allow us as a species to adapt to change.
Adapting Nassim’s language: if countries are individually robust, humanity is fragile. But if we have many countries, each singularly unique in some way yet collectively offering a dramatic array of variation—cultures, laws, social structures, educational models, technologies—humanity becomes antifragile.
But we don’t have enough countries.
There are 195 countries for 7 billion people, or 35 million people per country on average. In contrast, consider that there are 1.2 million species in nature. Ants alone have 10,000 species. Nature certainly understands that quantity matters.
So, what if we had more countries? What if we had, say, 1,000 countries with, on average, 7 million people each? Each different, each unique in some ways. More variety, more cultures, more experimentation.
By the way, the idea of many more polities has been articulated before. In 1977, Christopher Alexander, an architect, published A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. The book is a collection of 253 timeless patterns for how people should structure their living environments—at every scale, from regions to cities to neighborhoods to houses to rooms—so that they would live in harmony with their fundamental natures.
Pattern #1 is: “Do what you can to establish a world government, with a thousand independent regions, instead of countries.” Specifically, Alexander proposes:
Wherever possible, work toward the evolution of independent regions in the world; each with a population between 2 and 10 million; each with its own natural and geographic boundaries; each with its own economy; each one autonomous and self-governing; each with a seat in a world government, without the intervening power of larger states or countries.
To summarize: We need many more countries, each different, unique in some ways. Without that, we have too much similarity, and we’re at risk of not having the diversity of ideas, cultures, approaches—the Creative Minorities—that will help us survive and thrive in the long term.
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On how
A new country requires a truly clean slate, including contiguous land. But there isn’t viable, contiguous, and unclaimed land available. And yet a path exists in theory: a new country, created initially in the cloud with disjoint enclaves, can crowdsource a large enough sum of money to strike a deal with an existing country for land, thereby peacefully acquiring a truly clean slate.
The idea of many fragile countries is a scary thought in some ways. Don’t we want countries to be robust? Who wants lots of fragile countries? We feel scared because we think of countries as everlasting things—the fundamental containers inside which we exist. And for good reason: history has shown that terrible things happen when a country fails.
But what if the dynamic between countries was different? What if the human dynamic between and within countries was not what we’ve experienced historically (war, conquest, revolution) but something closer to modern corporate transactions (negotiation, deals, partnerships, acquisitions, divestitures)? If countries interacted with each other more like companies—starting, thriving, failing, merging, separating, partnering—would we think differently about diversity, variation, and fragility?
After all, both countries and companies are simply collections of people forming an agreement to band together for their individual and collective interests.
Why is it that people have so many more options to cooperate and organize for commercial goals than ways to cooperate and organize as a society?
Balaji proposed a discontiguous collection of people as a country. I wholeheartedly agree with his early stage process: cloud first, land later. But I see a discontiguous collection of people as an intermediate step because I don’t see how we achieve the goals for which creating a new country are a means by creating a country on top of a country.
Unless I misunderstand, in the discontiguous approach the citizens of the new country would still be subject to the laws, regulations, and taxes of the base country. If a group in Wyoming created a new country, they would still have to pay US taxes. If not, then they’d effectively be seceding and, presumably, taking the land with them—a proposition not likely to sit well with the US government.
But without complete independence—outright ownership of land, free of laws, regulations, and taxes—it’s hard to imagine how we can achieve our goals of creating something entirely new. It wouldn’t be a clean slate.
I see the phase of discontiguous land and cloud country as an intermediate stage: create the cloud entity; gather the group of people; form the social and economic structures; build cities in VR; crowdfund—and then, buy clean slate land from an existing country.
For example: say we aimed for a country of one million people and each person contributed 10 BTC, or $600,000 in today’s exchange rate, to the goal of acquiring and developing territory.
With hard commitments and internal agreement on goals, you could, in theory, approach a country and form a deal to acquire a portion of their territory.
Consider that the United States outright purchased a large part of the current geographic United States from France: the Louisiana Purchase (in white below). They paid $15 million, or $35 billion in current dollars, for 828,000 square miles in what must surely be one of the greatest real estate deals of all time.
While buying large portions of countries doesn’t happen as visibly today, the practice of countries selling components of value isn’t outright alien. Consider that many countries have investment for citizenship programs. You can become a New Zealand citizen by investing $10 to $12 million in the country.
If that’s the retail rate for citizenship in a wealthy country, maybe there’s a bulk purchase rate for land acquisition with a smaller or less wealthy country.
Consider: Singapore is a country of six million on contiguous geographic land of less than 300 square miles. (For context: that is less than a fourth of the size of Rhode Island, the smallest state in the United States.) In 1965, Singapore was expelled from Malaysia. Malaysia has 127,000 square miles of land, so they ejected less than a quarter of one percent of their land area.
And yet, in 2019, the GDP of Malaysia (population: 32 million) was $365 billion, or $11,000 per capita, and the GDP of Singapore (population: 6 million), was $372 billion, or $65,000 per capita.
If a group of one million crowdsourced $600 billion and used half for acquisition and half for development, would that math work? Would a country of similar size and wealth to Malaysia sell 300 square miles, just a quarter of one percent of its land, for $300 billion, or just about one year of GDP?
By the way, the transaction doesn’t have to be (and likely wouldn’t be) as simple as that. Within corporate transactions and partnerships, there’s a mind-boggling array of structures. Beyond the obvious IPOs and mergers and acquisitions and spinoffs, there are spin-ins, reverse mergers, SPACs, direct listings, partial spinoffs, etc. Within partnerships, there’s almost an infinite array: distribution partnerships, marketing partnerships, development partnerships, and so on.
Similarly, there are other forms by which a group could acquire land other than outright purchase on day one. There might be an agreement to pay a certain portion of tax revenue for a number of years. There may be co-development and education agreements, whereby the citizens of the divesting country can improve the education and skills of its own workforce, to the benefit of the acquiring country.
Ultimately, the acquiring country and the divesting country would only agree if there is a win-win, and there are many ways to structure an agreement so that both parties win.
To summarize: The ultimate goal should be to create a new country on contiguous land with a truly clean slate. And we can do this by striking a deal with an existing country, borrowing from and building on templates that exist in corporate transactions and partnerships.