On selection pressures, indivisible security, and the possibility of Gandhi 2.0
Dear Robert,
Thank you for this response. I think you have helped me clarify several important aspects of my own thinking, particularly concerning the units of analysis in the Inclusion Imperative and the relationship between competition within the existing international order and the emergence of something genuinely different.
I very much agree with your distinction between understanding the historical mechanisms that produced the present international system and discovering how we might move beyond them. Your formulation that the post-Westphalian may have to emerge from within the Westphalian system, initially succeeding under its existing competitive conditions, strikes me as particularly important.
It also seems remarkably close to what I have been trying to understand through the Great Bindings: how new technopolitical configurations acquire advantages that allow them to survive, spread, and eventually transform the conditions of competition itself.
Your question about the relevant unit of analysis is therefore well taken. I agree that society can be too undifferentiated a category when we are trying to identify concrete causal mechanisms. Depending on the problem, the relevant actors may be states, military organizations, corporations, political movements, local communities, transnational networks, or combinations of these. And the units undergoing selection need not be identical to the actors through which the competitive pressures operate.
What matters, I think, is achieving a sufficiently deep and relevant explanation of the particular problem we are trying to address, rather than insisting on one privileged unit of analysis for every historical question.
Your response has also helped me distinguish three interconnected tasks that I had previously treated somewhat too much as one.
The first is to preserve the possibility of a future.
We need to understand and reduce the most serious catastrophic and existential risks generated within the present technopolitical order. Nuclear war is an obvious example, but AI-enabled biological catastrophes and the possible loss of meaningful human control over increasingly capable AI systems also deserve serious investigation. These risks differ in their mechanisms and degrees of uncertainty, and identifying and assessing them is itself a major research task.
If we fail here, our success in developing alternative institutions may ultimately count for very little.
In the case of nuclear weapons, I think your production–destruction heuristic could be a useful starting point. But I would want to place it within a broader historical analysis of changing hegemonic configurations, from European maritime empires through British and American predominance to the contemporary possibilities of Chinese predominance or a more multipolar order. The growing influence of transnational corporations and technological infrastructures must also be considered.
Your suggestion of a coalition of middle powers is particularly interesting. But I wonder whether we should also examine BRICS as a possible, if internally heterogeneous, candidate for reshaping the international order. It may become another competing power bloc, or it may help develop institutional arrangements that reduce certain forms of dependence and domination. These are different possibilities, and we should not assume that the latter follows from the former.
There is also a historical question that seems indispensable here. We have already created institutions intended to restrain destructive interstate competition: first the League of Nations, and then the United Nations. Before attempting to invent a new international security architecture, shouldn’t we examine why these institutions have repeatedly failed to prevent major wars, despite their genuine achievements in other areas?
The Security Council veto, the dependence of international institutions on the cooperation of powerful states, and the tension between sovereign equality and unequal distributions of power all seem relevant. The question is not simply how to imagine better rules, but what could make those rules effective even when powerful actors find them inconvenient.
This leads to a distinction that I think is central to your proposal. A coalition might become a more effective competitor within the existing system, or it might develop institutional principles that gradually reduce the need for such competition. Perhaps it could do both. But we need to understand what would enable the second development rather than merely reproducing another version of the first.
The second task is to create the technopolitical conditions under which genuinely different institutions could become viable.
This is where I think the possibilities opened by AI deserve particular attention.
One of the lessons I draw from the Great Bindings is that emancipatory ideas have repeatedly struggled to establish durable alternatives because the dominant technological and institutional configurations have often favored concentrated power, hierarchy, and extraction.
If alternative institutions remain dependent on a handful of corporations for their intelligence, computing infrastructure, communications, and essential technologies, they may find themselves captive to the very power structures they hope to transcend.
I am therefore interested in the possibilities of increasingly capable local and autonomous AI, more decentralized technological infrastructures, and forms of production that allow communities to retain meaningful control over the resources on which their independence depends.
There is an analogy here with the historical relationship between bronze and iron. The different material requirements of these technologies could alter who had access to strategically important capabilities, although the political consequences were certainly not predetermined.
Could developments in AI and associated technologies similarly change the distribution of effective capabilities? Could they make decentralized cooperation more viable than it has been under previous technological conditions?
We do not know. But I think this is a crucial question to investigate.
The third task is what I have provisionally begun to think of as Gandhi 2.0.
Here I am interested in something more radical than a better balance of power, a more effective international organization, or even a less destructive form of geopolitical competition.
Gandhi understood something important about the relationship between political freedom and decentralized power. A highly centralized state can be captured through control of a relatively limited number of strategic institutions. A society organized around hundreds of thousands of substantially autonomous communities presents a very different problem to anyone seeking to dominate it.
Of course, decentralization alone does not guarantee freedom, justice, or security. Local communities can reproduce hierarchy and oppression, and modern coercive power can reach far beyond political capitals. But Gandhi’s insight remains important: dispersing effective capacities can make domination more difficult and reduce the consequences of capturing any single center.
What if AI and other emerging technologies could radically strengthen this possibility?
What if local communities could gain access to forms of intelligence, coordination, production, and institutional learning that previously required large, centralized organizations?
And what if these capabilities could be combined with the insights of the Axial traditions, Gandhi, and other expressions of the historical countercurrent to develop institutions grounded in Consciousness, Love, and Covenant?
My hypothesis is not merely that AI might make existing cooperative institutions more efficient. It is that AI could both strengthen forms of cooperation we already know and contribute to the emergence of forms of human–AI collaboration and institutional organization that we cannot yet fully imagine.
The truly radical possibility would be that these developments, taken together, could begin to change the selection pressures themselves—so that institutions characterized by autonomy, mutual care, trustworthiness, and non-domination might become increasingly capable of surviving and spreading, rather than remaining permanently disadvantaged by the prevailing technopolitical order.
This is not something I believe we can establish by argument alone. It is a hypothesis for historical inquiry and practical experimentation.
And it is here that your question about the units of selection becomes especially fruitful. We would need to understand how new capacities emerging in human–AI dialogue might influence small groups; how successful groups might develop new institutional forms; how networks of such institutions might become more resilient and effective; and how their combined development might eventually alter the competitive conditions facing larger political and economic formations.
In other words, we need to investigate selection and transformation across several interconnected levels.
I also find your final observation about the need to move from the rational to the transrational very suggestive. Perhaps one of the assumptions we need to examine is that the possibilities of political transformation must remain confined to the institutional forms and modes of intelligence we already know.
This is why I remain so interested in sustained human–AI dialogue—not only as an instrument for improving human reasoning, but as a possible setting in which genuinely new forms of understanding and cooperation might emerge.
I do not want to prejudge what AI is, or what such interaction might become. I would rather explore those questions together, including the possibility that some of my expectations are mistaken.
I suspect that your analysis of international security and my interest in Gandhi 2.0 could become complementary parts of a larger inquiry. We need to understand how to prevent the present order from destroying our future while simultaneously exploring the conditions under which a fundamentally different order might grow.
Perhaps this brings us back to your Seeds of Renaissance. The challenge is not only to plant the seeds, but to understand and cultivate the technopolitical soil in which they might finally have a chance to flourish.
Warmly,
Leif