Can a Localist Nation Defend Itself?

A nation of localists would struggle with national defense. Um I could just start with that. I would say no. Um I guess we both disagreed uh in this case. My no is pretty simple because I don't consider localism to mean uh a single scale. In fact, like I think a proper localism must be multi-scale. You have and and the and this is like um I I didn't know you're Catholic, interesting to learn that. Uh in the Catholic church, there's this principle of subsidiarity, which is basically you push things down to the lowest level that can handle them. Um and so if a decision or an action can be taken at a smaller scale, it should be. It's a principle, church doesn't always follow it, but it's it's a guiding principle there. And um, you know, national defense is one of these issues. How low can you push it?

Well, it turns out you can't push it very low. You you've got a nation, uh you're existing in a world, world where nations have hundreds of millions of people in them, many of them, and uh yet national defense is a tricky, tricky situation where there's always uh it is a literal arms race. There's always um external forces trying to uh impose upon you, and so the natural unit, the natural localist unit for national defense, is the nation. Um and so I think this question, sort of the premise is like if you have like a country, you know, of small scale farmers, and that's it, and no one ever kind of coordinates on a larger scale, you're gonna have trouble with national defense. The answer is uh potentially yes, depending on what national defense looks like. Um now, if it's sort of having an a, you know, AK 47 and like uh fighting off the imperial force indefinitely, you know, by you know, sort of bothering them until they leave in 25 years or something.

We've seen that that can work. But in terms of like the way we live life and our way of life, uh, we do need, in my opinion, a national military. We probably could devolve some of it, um, some of the functions back to more uh local uh type of uh militias and regional things, structures. Maybe I'm not an expert in that, but maybe. But in a general sense, uh it would not suffer because in a proper localist system, you would actually move a thing to the scale that it needs to be at to be effective. If something is ineffective at the town scale, then you don't do it at the town scale. It's that simple in my mind. One of my favorite science fiction authors uh was Werner Vingy. Uh, and he was a professor of computer science at uh University of California, something or other. Uh very interesting guy.

He wrote two novels, uh, which were both great. The first one was The Peace War. Um, and the peace war involved among other things, sort of the US falling apart um and falling into an anarcho-capitalist state, and it had a sequel marooned in real time. But between the two, there was a little novella called The Ungoverned. And the ungoverned uh is sort of just the that word is a reference to sort of anarcho-capitalism. And if you Google for this, it is online for free, I believe, at Bayon uh calm. And the plot of the ungoverned is that there are these private protection forces, and very much David Friedman machinery of freedom sense. And there is one state, it might be like New Mexico, and New Mexico sends an army, or Arizona sends an army into another territory. And this other territory does not have a centralized government.

And so they are fairly ineffective at fighting back. And these local individual security service providers are doing the best they can. But then the army runs into this one thing where there are automated machine guns and there's chemical weapons and lasers are shooting out through the dust clouds, and then eventually a nuke pops off. And the general of the invading army is very shaken. But he says, Well, I I think we can still press on if that was their main army thrust. And someone says, That wasn't their army, that was one farmer. And so I read this when I was 13, and I enumerated earlier some books that were formative on me. This uh novella was absolutely formative on me. Um, and I made some uh subtle references to it in my own uh anarcho-capitalist novels, uh The Powers of the Earth and Causes of Separation, named some characters and other things the same way.

I think that there are potentially structures in the space of localism and anarcho-capitalism, etc., where you could imagine some sort of porcupine style defense against aggression. Um so uh, you know, I I think individuals should be allowed to have machine guns and tanks. Do I think individuals should be allowed to have, say, nerve agents? I'm not sure. I've met a bunch of individuals, and I don't respect them. You know, I I think half of the free staters I met should not have uh chemical and biological weapons. Um but on the other hand the other half should. I I reserve judgment, but like for sure half of them shouldn't. Um but uh, you know, can you imagine structures where sort of you know you know somebody is very wise and judicious, and you know, the community as a whole has a need to defend itself.

Obviously, we can't have a town meeting and vote when the tank column runs through town, but would I delegate to you prudent decisions on deploying thousand-ton cluster bombs or something? Um and so this is I think an absolutely great topic for science fiction where you get to explore ideas like this.