We often imagine how different politics would be with change in time, or with technology, or with changes in scope. We often picture the future as involving complex decisions with more intricate part, less internal bickering, and with less human strife on a scale we’re not prepared for. Now, I won’t underscore the importance of human achievement in general. However, who can honestly state that political development has grown into a revered, functional, and appreciated field? Bickering caking bureaucracy is the only way the whole ordeal is ever described. What is key to understand, from a survivalist location, is that those in politics are there trying to both maintain and expand their survival.
Utopian politics generally seem alien, but have a pattern to them we’d recognize. Without scarcity of resources, political power itself would become far more vital, as would general presence and prominence. Even without shortage of resources or distribution, survival isn’t a flat check box, and old wants would become new needs. This is expected and expanded on, and occurs within the subsets of resources that do reach post scarcity in their core environments. But politics inherently has human components, and the first human, or even organic, component is action towards survival.
What then are the politics of the immortal?
Let’s set the basis. We have a society. Within that society, different resources are manipulated. Within those manipulations, individuals come up to get the majority stake in them. This happens whether death is a threat or not. What’s different?
The resources, naturally, but also the methodology. If your survival, or the relevance of your life, is not dependent on how much time you can spend influencing those resources, the entire environment is upended. You would see politicians acting for exactly as long as they think they need to, and not any more or less. Political survival itself would not be a priority, because the nature of the way one values their own existence is different. Politics in an immortal society would have little distinction from AI managed politics; complex comparisons of needs to maximize general output.
Notably, I’m not referring to state politics. If your position is not one of “The State, in some regard, needs to be dissolved if humanity is to see any positive progression” then by this point you’re just not paying attention. I’ll leave late night discussions and even later night blog posts to address that point. What I refer to when I say politics in this case is simply the methods by which different individuals position and attempt to approach resources. Power is complex and difficult to imagine in a setting where survival cannot be threatened, and it is precisely that difficulty that is brought about through this thought experiment.
Take your time with this. Think on the structures that would form. Think on the decisions that you, as something without a resource upkeep cost, would make if you were interacting with someone else in a likewise position. Even in an abstract sense, it’s hard to conceptualize our positions there at all. Even when put in such thought experiments, we usually default to seeing how we would survive in such a situation. It’s a delightful exercise, but no doubt among your conclusions will be the absolute vital aspect that survival plays in how we make even our most esoteric decisions.
Establishing just how strange the politics of the immortals is a precise and vital step in understanding Necrology.