The plague of the Petroleum Era, the true bane of organized government

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It becomes the Gordian knot, the labyrinth with no end, the bureaucratic nightmare.

Moebianism

Derived from the concept of the Moebius strip, an object with only one side and one boundary component. The famous aphorism is that an ant could walk the length of a moebius strip, traverse the entire thing and never cross single boundary, but still managing to walk on both sides of the strip of paper. So it eventually began to apply to the artefacts of government. One could start walking, metaphorically speaking, and traverse one government entity, into another department, into another agency, and again back into the original entity with no disruption of continuity.

In the Cosmic Era, this is a common theme applied to the Petroleum Era, the hallmark of incestuously grown together government with a very profound non-existence of separation of powers. This system predominated in the late Petroleum Era moving into the Resource Wars. The first world Federal superstates became choked with interlinking, interbreeding government agencies and departments. Many of these systems were in place for no other reason than to ensure a specific amount of funding, or to allow a certain section its own leeway to issue rules and regulations as it saw fit.

Like the hydra, the moebian foe cannot be easily defeated, because cutting off a head does nothing, the head is regrown, and then there are two heads instead of one. Threaten a branch, and the branch splits into two branches. Attempt to defund a department, and there is no way to find the throat to choke it off, there is nothing by writhing necks and jaws full of teeth. The amount of waste was enormous, and quite unforgivably, deliberate.

Retro is Now

The waste and inefficiency of the Petroleum Era is seen as one of the biggest problems, and one of the leading triggers that lead to the Resource Wars, and the horrors of the population contraction, and the Oxygen Depletion incident. Rather than working together to face the challenges of dwindling cheap resources, the dangers of viral weaponry, and other socio-economic issues tied to overpopulation, the byzantine leviathans instead fought to secure their own short term wealth. The systems were too congested and bloated to do anything other than flop about, lash out at their own citizenry, and command the existing military to devour the remaining resources as fast as possible in a desperate bid to get the proverbial last slice of pizza.

Anti-Moebianism

In the Cosmic Era, there are certainly still gargantuan fixtures of government, but they are not on a scale comparable to the Petroleum Era. There are also still very obviously corrupt and unethical government and business people who are going to built their fortunes on the backs of the poor, but again, not on the scale of the Petroleum Era. In some parts of the world, the defacto form of government is simple dictatorship. Nippon is again ruled by the Emperor sitting on the Chrysanthemum Throne, and the state elected Premiere of the Eurasian Alliance is very much a return of the Russian Tzarists.

The anti-moebianist movement goes hand in hand with the collectivism, and eco-friendliness of the Cosmic Era. After gaining a new two century stint of Dark Ages is conditioned by experience to have a strong dislike of waste, and wastefulness. Inefficient systems are offensive, and the Petroleum Era style of democracy is a thing of a past.

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3 comments

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  1. Murometz

    I really enjoyed reading this one! Smells of post-modern real-politik.

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  2. PoisonAlchemist

    I like the term and the explanation for it. It's a depressing thing but not entirely unreasonable. Someone has really been studying what happens when we start to transition to a post-scarcity economy.

    1 xp Reply +XP
  3. valadaar

    Very esoteric stuff here. Very specialized but an interesting idea.

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  1. The Population Contraction by Scrasamax Bound

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