An Idyllic World Order

There are, at the time of writing, somewhat over 8 billion live human beings on Planet Earth. And the planet can support at least twice this number with more than adequate contingency.

The Individual

Each of these 8 billion human beings arrived here with nothing. It brought nothing with it when it was born. Each will leave with nothing. It will take nothing with it when it dies. But while it lives, it exists as an integral subsystem of the Earth's biosphere, from which it must continually receive its needs of life.

Each human being has an 86 billion-neuron brain — a vast analogue supercomputer housed in its cranium — which appears to accommodate a conscious 'self'. This en­ables that 'self' to reason and remember in order — through its biological body — to sense, classify, learn about and interact with its outside world. That 'outside world' comprises both a physical universe and a social universe.

Each self's physical body is, in the strictest sense, a mere object within the physical universe as a whole. Notwithstanding, it is an integral part of the Earth's biosphere, a particular small part of that physical universe, on which it vitally depends to sustain its existence. It must continually receive its physical needs: water, food, clothing and shelter in order to live. Conversely, it must return its waste to the biosphere in a form that the biosphere can naturally re-cycle.

Each conscious self's social universe potentially comprises [at the present time] the 8 billion or so other individual conscious selves on the planet. These form a society of sentient beings who randomly and arbitrarily interact with each other, as equal peers, according to a natural social protocol, which is ostensibly benign and self-regulating. This is because, in such a society, any extreme excursions from the be­havioural norm is readily moderated by the presence of autoreactive peers.

Each of us arrives here with nothing. Not one of us can prescribe or determine the situation or circumstances into which he is born. Consequently, he cannot possibly have any conscious, physical, systemic or moral influence on what his biological forbears may or may not have produced or achieved beforehand here on Earth. Whether high-born or low-born, he arrives having neither produced nor achieved anything himself. He therefore merits nothing. And in this respect, all human beings are born equal.

Thus, to my mind, all should have equal inheritance in the planet on which they are born. Conversely, each must relinquish his planetary inheritance, to humanity as a whole, when he dies.

The Collective

Society is a collective of individuals, each of whom is separately and independently conscious. Each is self-aware with feelings, values and aspirations. Each perceives, observes, experiences, reasons, loves and suffers. Each is precious. Society, on the other hand, is not intrinsically conscious. So although people may imagine it as having a zeitgeist, it is not, in reality, self-aware. It has no feelings, values or aspira­tions. It doesn't perceive, observe, experience, reason, love or suffer. Therefore, it is only the individual that matters. Society is a mere consequence.

As bound by self-evident natural justice, any social order, must serve and protect the individual — all individuals, without exception or exclusion. Nation, state, com­munity, company, union, church, clique — or any other socially divisive collective — matters nothing. So, in an ideal world, how should the biological and psychological functionality and well-being of the individual be sustained? How must a social order facilitate the individual's natural mission to turn his labour into his needs of life? A snippet of ancient wisdom offers a relevant pointer:

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which hav­ing no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest. — Proverbs 6:6-8

This text may at first appear to be a chastisement by the writer to an archetypical lazy good-for-nothing layabout. However, I see within it something vastly more pro­found and relevant than just that. The first point is that the writer asks the reader to consider the ways of the ant [singular] — an insect, which is probably not con­scious; not self-aware. In other words: look to nature. Look how an ant naturally provides for itself.

It acts as a participative individual within a 'society' comprising a vast multitude of ants which effectively cooperate in an enormous process by which all are provided with food throughout the whole cycle of the seasons. Yet the ant 'society' has no guide, overseer or ruler. In other words, there is no bureaucratic hierarchy manag­ing the whole process with directors, managers, team leaders and supervisors tell­ing each individual worker what to do and when. Consequently, each ant must act unilaterally on its own self-formulated orders according to its own assess­ment of its current situation with input from 'conversations' with its neighbouring peers.

The ancient writer may be implying that perhaps this is the way his reader should be providing his "meat in the summer, and gathering his food in the harvest". In other words, human society too should operate as an inherently self-regulating complex-dynamical system.

Property & Ownership

What about the ant's productive resources? Who owns the ant colony's accommo­dation and its harvestable hinterland? As the ant has "no guide, overseer, or ruler", so too it has no king, baron or landlord. So it neither rents its home or workplace, nor does it have to buy its productive resources. It simply works [without charge, let or hindrance] in the space it freely occupies and freely [without paying or incurring debt] takes its raw materials from its natural hinterland.

The ancient writer may thus also be implying that perhaps this is where his reader should be working to provide his "meat in the summer, and gather his food in the harvest". In other words, human society too should operate [without rent, tax or whatever other imposition] in free terraspace. However, if land be open and free, wouldn't the individual occupation and usage of it rapidly descend into a self-destructive free-for-all?

Well, "look to the ant, thou sluggard". Is this what happens in a colony of ants? No. Somehow they seem to respect each other's working space and just carry on in benign coordination. The same is true of termites, shape-shifting shoals of fish, murmurations of starlings and itinerant herds of animals. So too with the air mole­cules within the weather systems of the Earth's atmosphere and water molecules within transoceanic currents. So too in all complex-dynamical systems.

The movement of individuals [molecules, insects, fish, birds, animals] within their respective 'societies' may appear chaotic. But it's not. It is rigorously deterministic and orderly. But it's complex. And the secret of its orderliness and benign complex behaviour is due to a concept known as the individual's 'mean free path' and the intrinsic rules by which the individual interacts with its neighbours so as to maintain that 'mean free path'.

Mean Free Terraspace

The mean free path of a molecule in the atmosphere or ocean is determined by a balance between differently scaled attractive and repulsive force fields. The mean free path of a starling within a swirling murmuration is maintained by each individ­ual's ability to regulate, within prescribed limits, the distance between itself and its closest 5 neighbours. All under immediate individual control: no management hier­archy, civil administration or globally-enforced common law. A complex-dynamical system self-regulates through what is termed Fractal Law: a universal protocol that defines the behaviour of each pair of encountering neighbours.

The mean free path that an individual takes within a complex-dynamical collective defines, creates and maintains his accommodation, gathering and working space. It thus maintains what may be termed his 'mean free space'. So, does the individual [molecule, insect, fish, bird, animal] own his mean free space? Could it be rightly described as its property? In a general [non-legal] sense, yes; although since it is maintained by the individual's ability to regulate it within prescribed limits, its size and shape would be somewhat elastic.

So, what about humans? Could human society operate on this entirely complex-dynamical principle? Yes. If the 8 billion human beings on Earth today were to occupy all the Earth's habitable land, each individual would have about 2 hectares [5 acres]. However, they would not need as much as that to provide their needs of life: water, food, space and recreation.

Suppose that 3-generation families, with an average of 7 souls per family, were distributed, with ostensibly equal spacing, throughout all the habitable land of the planet. Each family would have a mean free space of 152,475m² [just over 15 hect­ares = almost 37 acres] per family. Thus, each home would be at the centre of a circle of land of about 220 metres radius.

But should a human family own its mean free space? Yes, but in a very different sense from the way in which the ownership of land is commonly understood or recognised by law throughout the world today. Currently, ownership signifies that the owner has the right to fence off and exclude other people from his land so that he alone can occupy it and use it as space to live and as a resource with which to generate — directly or indirectly — his needs of life.

The forces that determine the mean free space between molecules are highly non-linear. If one molecule gets too close to another, they repel each other with a force, which gets ever stronger the closer they are to each other and weakens the further they are from each other. Analogically, the strength or degree of exclusiveness, with regard to a family's circle of land, should become progressively stronger as an in­truding stranger approaches their dwelling and progressively weaker as he recedes from it, falling to zero at its unfenced boundary.

A similar sense should apply to the family's economic use of its mean free space. The land can be cultivated intensively close to their dwelling, becoming progres­sively less so as one moves away from it and becoming fully wilded at the peri­phery. This regime allows the family to gain their needs of life from the land, while facilitating free passage for the traveller.

Semi-Nomadic Dwellings

Obviously, the homes of such a distributed population are high-science low-tech terrestrial dwellings, which are fabricated from naturally available raw materials. They provide modern comforts and services off-grid and function equally well within any habitable climate and land-type on the planet. A terrestrial dwelling is both a general and specialist workplace for its occupiers as well as a place for them to live.

A terrestrial dwelling is designed to impinge as little as possible upon the planet, causing minimum disturbance to nature. Its profile is streamlined so as to passively resist violent weather. It is able to abstract water and energy sustainably from the wilderness and return its waste to the wilderness in a form that can be sustainably re-cycled by nature. It is equipped with multi-function robotic agricultural machin­ery, specifically designed for precision small-scale operation, to provide an agree­able balanced diet for the dwelling's occupants, without them having to have pro­found agricultural knowledge.

A terrestrial dwelling is also vehicular — or, at least, easily transportable — so that a family may satisfy its nomadic desire to experience life in different parts of the world from time to time, without the trauma of having to move into a different dwelling. To make such moves possible, there is a centralised passive mechanism for dynamically allocating and re-allocating appropriate sized lots of 'mean free terraspace'. For this reason, there is a fundamental ethos, within society as a whole, which obliges each family to maintain its 'mean free terraspace' in good condition for the next occupiers if and when a move is made.

Anthropological Communities

A median of 2 hectares [the amount of habitable land available on the planet per human individual] would be more than sufficient mean free space for the whole of an average human family. Of course, the actual size of each such 'landshare' must flex according to climate and land productivity in the region of the planet where it is situated.

This contraction of the mean free terraspace occupied by each human family frees up most of the habitable planetary surface for natural conservation and free open itinerant travel. It also allows groups of families to gravitate into what I call anthro­pological communities. An anthropological community is a group of 50 or so families [100 to 150 souls] whose portions of 'mean free terraspace' [landshares] pseudo-concatenate into a contiguous area to form a distributed intentional community.

NOTE: the size of a standard landshare could be set to anything from 2 to 5 hectares without encroaching too much on what is reserved for natural conservation and itinerant travel.

Such an anthropological community is almost certainly larger than the average city dweller's personal coterie in the world today. And it is located in benign and inspir­ational natural surroundings rather than in the isolation of a concrete & glass cage [apartment] in a city [what Desmond Morris called a human zoo]. Such an anthropo­logical community thereby offers a vastly higher quality of life and degree of social connection than does a modern town or city. It also enables collective economic endeav­ours to be carried out in distributed dwelling-based workspaces.

Social Transition

The first stage of transition towards this idyllic world order is to consider the natural habitable surface of the planet and, ignoring current urbanisation, map on to it a pattern of anthropological communities, each comprising 50 or so unit landshares, sufficient to accommodate the present global population.

Next, allocate and place on record a landshare [an appropriate sized portion of mean free terraspace] to each family. This landshare is their self-evident rightful inheritance of the planet on which they were born. Then, where possible, install each family, within a terrestrial dwelling, in its allocated landshare.

Each family, allocated to a landshare that is currently occupied by existing urbanis­ation, is to receive rent plus a portion of the economic yield from their landshare's current occupiers. Thus, taxation is no longer on labour but is on yield. It is a due paid to the lowly by the mighty: not a tribute forcibly extracted by the mighty from the lowly.

The socio-economic order of the present world bestows health, wealth and happi­ness upon the exigent, relegating the meek to misery and starvation, with a stress-ridden middle maj­or­ity in a churning cauldron of economic uncertainty. In such a rancid dog-pile world, any cockamamie alternative must be worth a try.

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© 07 December 2025 Robert John Morton