Did you know that there is a patch of unclaimed territory on the map? A little stretch of desert that no government lays claim to?
It’s right between Egypt and Sudan and neither claim it because Egypt recognizes the border drawn in 1899 and Sudan recognizes the border drawn in 1902; each, in exchange for giving up Bir Tawil, lays claim to Hala’ib, a much larger stretch of land with arable soil and coastline on the Red Sea.
Because neither government lays claim to the territory, over the years, multiple “governments” have been established in the land, though each claim has been abandoned as the overzealous Westerners learned what it actually means to rule over an uninhabited desert.
But I haven’t laid my claim yet.
Several years ago, I wrote the outline of a political manifesto. I was very proud of it, but I never put in the time to actually complete a draft. The closest I came was to write and publish a short series of essays on my proposed healthcare, housing, and tax systems.
Here is my preamble:
Utopia means “No place.” There is no society where everyone is happy. There is no political system which operates in harmony and magnanimity. There is no economic system which gives humanity everything they need. There is no perfect.
Instead, we live in the real world. In the real world, sometimes our understanding stands up to the tests and sometimes it doesn’t. But we have a great resource for comparing which ideas work and which don’t: history. We have access to the records of thousands of years of it. Records of politics, of societies struggling in the real world, of real people facing real problems with real solutions. Humanity’s problems never end. They can’t. But neither do solutions.
The two greatest resources in the world are human ingenuity and human effort. And they are not easy resources to harness en masse. But when societies are built on the right ideas, when ingenuity and effort can come together in the right way, there’s no limit to what humanity can accomplish.
What is the role of government? To provide order and justice in a society. Order and justice are simple words but they have the capacity to represent a complex of systems and bureaucracies in the real world. Courts. Police. Borders. Currency. Infrastructure. And modern interpretations of order and justice add into the definition things like education, housing, healthcare.
But what are the best systems for providing all this order and justice in an imperfect, impure, complex and nuanced real world? And how do we set up sufficient safeguards against the abuse of any systems powerful enough to provide them?
In a nation of freedom and democracy, these are the questions facing each and every one of us. And, with history as our guide, we can find workable answers.
Over the course of this manifesto, I will discuss a wide variety of topics and put forth many precedented and unprecedented designs for systems that I think could sustain our society.
But utopia means “no place.” And no manifesto can bring “no place” into the real world.
My discovery of Bir Tawil has reinvigorated my passion for writing a newer, better constitution, to found a new nation on all the right principles so that, even a small patch of desert surrounded by corrupt, poverty-stricken countries, can thrive and invite the diverse peoples of the Earth to build their own futures. Perhaps, sometime in the near future, I will complete and publish My First Political Manifesto.
Once I do that, all it will take is a few billion dollars to start up the perfect country!
